



vP b 






1 o. 














^, 



^ 










o •» c ^ 







y sjmzik. \ ,<- /ksstwi:. ° .^* *w^ 



TALES FROM A FAMISHED LAND 



TALES FROM A 
FAMISHED LAND 

INCLUDING 

The White Island— A 
Story of the Dardanelles 

BY 
EDWARD EYRE HUNT 

Author of "War Bread," Etc." 




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE tf COMPANY 
igi8 



■p 



^ 






1 



Copyright, 1918, by 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

Ml rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 



COPYRIGHT, I9l6, IOI7, BY THE REPUBLIC PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. 

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE AMERICAN RED CROSS SOCIETY 

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY P. F. COLLIER'S SONS 



MAR 28 1918 
©CLA492765 



To THE 

MEMORY OF E. O. 



Collier's Weekly, The Outlook, The New 
Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and The 
Red Cross Magazine have published certain 
of these tales in serial form, and to them 
my thanks are due for permission to re- 
publish in book form. 



FOREWORD 

HERBERT CLARK HOOVER, chair- 
man of the Commission for Relief in 
Belgium, once called that amazing 
organization, "the door in the wall of steel. ,, 
Between November, 19 14, and March, 191 7, 
when America entered the world war, there 
had passed through that door millions of 
dollars in money, thousands of tons of food- 
stuffs and clothing, and four or five dozen 
young Americans, most of them just out of 
their 'teens, who played a part in Belgian 
history which they are still trying to explain 
in words of one syllable to admiring rela- 
tives and friends! 

Theirs is a story of sweet romance, gallant 
adventure, grotesque comedy, and grim trag- 
edy. The tales which are here set down are 
a part of their story. These tales are not 
strictly truth, but they are not fiction. They 
ix 



Foreword 

are both. They try to describe the state of 
mind, the atmosphere in which History — 
both truth and fiction — is made; the atmos- 
phere behind long lines of barbed-wire and 
bayonets, behind waves of poisoned gas, in 
a famished land where ten million heroic 
people, both French and Belgians, have 
silently and steadily fought to keep their 
self-respect, their sanity, and their courage. 

These tales have been written in a spirit 
of gratitude and love; with gratitude and 
love first of all to Herbert Clark Hoover, 
then to the other officers and members of 
the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and 
then, and perhaps most of all, to those un- 
named French, Walloon, and Flemish millions 
with whom we Americans stood shoulder to 
shoulder on the inside of the "door in the 
wall of steel." 

E. E. H. 
4 Place de la Concorde, Paris 

New Year's Day, igi8. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Foreword ix 

I. Saint Dympna's Miracle . 3 

II. Love in a Barge .... 19 

HI. The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 29 

IV. Figures of the Dance . . 46 

V. The Saviour of Mont Cesar 61 

VI. Ghosts 86 

VII. The Deserter 96 

VIII. The Glory of Tinarloo . . 114 

IX. A Flemish Fancy . . . . 122 

X. The Swallows of Diest . . 135 

XI. Pensioners 148 

XII. Dona Quixote 160 

XIII. In the Street of the Spy . 167 

XIV. The White Island — A Story 

of the Dardanelles . . 176 

xi 



TALES FROM A FAMISHED LAND 



Tales From a Famished jTand 



SAINT DYMPNA'S MIRACLE 

PIERRE, the chauffeur, launched a 
savage kick at the newly punctured 
tire and swore into the night. 
"Three quarters of an hour, monsieur, to 
repair it," he said reluctantly, switching off 

the motor. "Do you wish " 

Into the sudden silence stole the slow, 
incessant roar of the Yser cannon. The 
level stretches of the Campine, alternating 
black vistas of scrub evergreens with little 
fields, peat bogs, and kitchen gardens, lay 
fragrant and silent in the moonlight. Hea- 
ther was in bloom, nightingales were nest- 
ing and so were no longer singing, and the 
narrow Flemish road before and behind the 
l3l 



Tales From a Famished Land 

automobile lay like a placid silver river, in- 
viting one to quiet thoughts. 

" Yes/' I answered Pierre's unfinished query. 
"I'll go for a stroll toward the next farm- 
house. Take your time, Pierre. There's no 
hurry to-night." 

We had just left the town of Gheel, one 
of the most remarkable places in Belgium, a 
town where more than a thousand insane 
folk live quiet and useful lives, parcelled out 
among the peasants, but under the super- 
vision of district doctors. The insane are 
treated as if they were normal beings, are 
given work according to their strength, men- 
tal and physical, and find companionship 
among a peasantry 'noted for industry and 
stubborn independence. This is originally 
due to certain miracles of Saint Dympna, 
one of the guardian saints of the insane — an 
Irish princess, converted to Christianity, 
and martyred at Gheel by her pagan father 
on the 30th of May in the year of Our Lord 
600. 

Under the bright moon the land seemed 

[4] 



Saint Dympnas Miracle 

singularly like Ireland, and a little old man 
stepping toward me down the silvery road, 
his pipe in his mouth, his eyes screwed up, 
his bent legs wrapped in ill-fitting trousers, 
his feet in wooden shoes, might have been 
the fabled leprechaun, or Wee Hughie Gal- 
lagher of Donegal. He wore a brassard on 
his right sleeve, for he was one of the village 
watch, guarding the telephone and telegraph 
wires so that no accident might happen to 
them to give the Germans an excuse for 
crushing the commune with an exorbitant 
fine. 

"Goe'n avondy mynheer" I called cheerfully. 

" Avondy mynheer" he answered in a weak 
voice. 

"I am the American delegate of the Ko- 
miteit voor Hulp en Voeding" I explained. 

"Mynheer is American ?" he asked doubt- 
fully, taking his pipe from his mouth and 
scratching his head as if to recall where or 
what America could be. 

" J a weL Have you a cup of milk at your 
house ?" 

[Si 



Tales From a Famished Land 

He turned and faced back down the road, 
still scratching his head. 

" Als 9 t U belief t y mynheer," I added cere- 
moniously. 

My superlative courtesy seemed to decide 
him, and he gave a gesture of assent. Side 
by side and in silence then we walked down 
the silver road to the first farmhouse. A 
black mass of protecting trees hung close 
over the chimney, and low thatch swept down 
like the back of some prehistoric monster, 
gray green in the clear moonlight. The 
walls were lath filled in with clay. Two 
little rectangular windows glowed dully, 
and the edges of the thick, ill-fitting door 
shone with faint light. 

" You live here, mynheer ?" I asked. 

" Ja, mynheer." 

"You own it?" 

"I rent it." 

"I may enter?" 

"You may enter, mynheer." 

He thrust open the door without knocking. 
I stumbled into the dimly lighted room, 
[6] 



Saint Dympnas Miracle 

hardly knowing what I expected to find. 
Peasants' cottages were invariably inter- 
esting to me, and invariably they contained 
surprises. But this was older and more 
primitive than any I had yet visited — a relic 
of long-gone days. It was like opening an 
ancient tomb or a buried city. I entered 
expectantly, and lo! the centuries rolled back- 
ward, and I stood with people of Froissart's 
day, with peasants who had scarcely altered 
since the Middle Ages, whose feet were hardly 
on the threshold of modernity. 

The room was square. At one end was 
a brick fireplace, rude as if aborigines had 
built it, with an iron frame squatting in the 
ashes, a thick pot suspended by a chain, a 
broiling rack, a heavy iron fork, a charred 
stick for a poker, and a rude crane. In the 
smoke of a tiny turf fire on the hearth hung 
rows of drying vegetables and skins of meat. 
The floor was beaten earth, hard as brick. 
The walls were whitewashed. The ceiling 
was low and strung with onions and other 
roots and vegetables, and the only touch of 

[7] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

modern things was a hanging lamp in the 
centre. In a corner hung a man's suit of 
Sunday clothes, like a creature which has 
been hanged. A ladder beside it went up 
to the blind loft overhead. A picture of 
the Virgin hung on one wall, and a plaster 
statuette of Saint Anthony and Saint Joseph 
gleamed from a shelf over the fireplace, draw- 
ing one's eye to a row of plates and dishes. 
An odour of smoke and cooking and manure 
heaps and the foul smells of unwashed human 
beings crowded the little room, and the air 
droned with the sleepy buzzing of innumer- 
able flies. 

A barefooted, prematurely aged woman, 
bent with too much child-bearing, gave me a 
chair, wiping it ceremoniously with her apron. 
The man spat on the floor behind us and 
scraped the spittle with his sabot. Three 
children were asleep in a recess on a pile of 
litter curtained from sight in the day-time. 
But the most striking person in the room 
was a young woman, sitting before the turf 
fire with a fourth child — evidently the young- 
[8] 



Saint Dympnas Miracle 

est — in her lap. She wore stockings, leather 
shoes, and a simple, black bombazine dress. 
Her face was turned from me, but I saw that 
her hair was neatly coiled about her head 
and pinned with a shell comb. 

The older woman sprang to the hanging 
lamp and turned it high until it smoked. 
"Good evening, mynheer," she called in a 
panic of fear and pleasure. "Be seated, if it 
please your Excellency." 

She dragged the chair beside the lamp 
and the table in the centre of the room. 
During the next five minutes she was fever- 
ishly busy offering me beer, milk, and every- 
thing else that her mean little house afforded. 

I stared at the woman beside the fireplace, 
and my host — who refused to seat himself 
in my presence — at last touched his head 
significantly. "Ah, monsieur," he sighed. 
(He had been one of the frank smannen, 
migratory labourers who work for several 
months of the year in France, and he spoke 
tolerable French. Indeed he was much bet- 
ter informed and quicker of wit than his 
t9] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

person or his home would indicate.) "She 
is mad: like all the world, she is mad. All 
the world is mad." 

"You mean the war?" 

"Yes, monsieur. Saint Dympna has re- 
ceived thousands of mad ones, and of those 
who are mad but whom she has not received, 
there are millions. When the war broke 
out two men went mad in this village. They 
were carried away to Gheel, raving. Their 
eyes stared, their lips frothed, and they 
twitched all over. When the Germans came 
here, certain ones went mad at sight of them. 
I have seen it with my eyes, monsieur. 
They say that when the Germans came into 
France they sent whole long trainloads of 
mad ones back into their own land. When 
the big shells burst in the forts, all the gar- 
rison goes mad. When the aviator flies over 
the trench, men go mad. You have seen 
there are always two German sentries to- 
gether? It is so that if one goes mad the 
other will be at hand. For they go mad, 
monsieur, by dozens, by hundreds, by thou- 

[10] 



Saint Dyrnpna's Miracle 

sands. Have you seen their eyes? They 
are mad. And their lips? They work like 
the lips of men always talking to themselves. 
When the war began, I, too, was mad. I 
dreamed terrible dreams. For two months 
I was mad — like all the world." 

"But the woman there ?" I asked, poind- 
ing to the figure beside the turf glow. 

The man clattered over to her and laid 
his hand gently on her shoulder. "Ma- 
dame," he said, "there is a gentleman here to 
speak with you." 

"Nay, mynheer," she answered quietly, 
"not until midnight." 

"He is not the doctor, madame." 

She turned and gave me a searching glance. 
The movement revealed that her breast was 
uncovered, and that she held the sleeping 
child against her heart. "Nay," she said 
again, "not until midnight." 

He came slowly back. "When a child 
is sick, she knows it and she comes," he ex- 
plained apologetically. "At midnight she 
goes back to the doctor's house." 

["I 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Alone?" 

"Alone, monsieur. God and the Devil 
alike love the mad. God and the Devil 
alike watch over them. This one" — he 
pointed to the woman with the child — "was 
a lady of Louvain, of the Krakenstraat; she 
was rich; she had a husband and two chil- 
dren. They were killed by the Germans 
and she was wounded in the shoulder. Her 
house was burned; her money lost. She went 
mad. She was taken to Duffel, I think; 
then to Antwerp, then to Hoogstraeten, then 
she was brought to Gheel, screaming for her 
children and her husband — mad — mad and 
soon to die. Then, monsieur, Saint Dympna 
wrought a miracle through the love of a 
little child, a little sick boy in the doctor's 
house where madame was confined, and she 
became well after a fashion. And now in 
whatever house a child is ill, madame by 
the grace of God knows of it, and she comes 
and nurses it back to health. The first mad- 
ness is of the Devil, monsieur, violent and 
bloody; the second is of God, and it is kind." 

[12] 



Saint Dympnas Miracle 

In the midst of his prattle the woman rose 
slowly, holding the sleeping child in the 
hollow of her right arm and buttoning the 
bosom of her dress with her left hand. 
"Hush!" she admonished softly. "Listen, 
mynheeren!" From some instinct of cour- 
tesy I rose to my feet. She raised her hand 
warningly but did not turn her head. "Lis- 
ten," she repeated, staring toward the fire- 
place. 

It was an uncanny thing. We stood as if 
frozen. The heavy breathing of the peasant 
woman pulsed through the quiet room; the 
old man stared with all his eyes; a sleepy 
chicken chuckled from an adjoining shed, 
but there was no other sound from outside. 
A minute went by; another; a third, and still 
we stood stiffly in the centre of the room. 
At last madame beckoned to the peasant- 
mother, who stole across the floor toward 
her and paused at her side. Silently she 
gave the mother her child, her finger on her 
lips, her eyes still fixed on the spot near the 
fireplace. 

[I3l 



Tales From a Famished Land 

Then she turned, and laying her hands on 
the head of the sleeping boy, she began in a 
strange, low, hissing voice, "This one shall 
be an avenger of Louvain, he shall be an 
avenger of Dinant, and Termonde, and 
Aerschot, and Andenne, and Liege, and 
Tamines, and Vise. He shall avenge our 
nation. He shall not forget. In the days 
of his happiness he shall remember our sor- 
row; in the days of his prosperity he shall 
remember our misery; in the days of his 
strength he shall remember our weakness. 
Go! Be healed!" Then in her quiet, nat- 
ural voice, pointing to the spot on a level 
with her eyes at which she had stared, she 
added, "A sick child is there, mynheeren. 
Three, four kilometres away it is, and I must 
go to it." 

"God!" the old man breathed. 

"I must go now. The child is very ill. 
I must go now, or I shall be too late." 

The old man crossed himself again and 
again. "God! God!" he repeated help- 
lessly. 

[14] 



Saint Dympnas Miracle 

The young woman wheeled suddenly. 
"What is that noise ?" she exclaimed, point- 
ing to the roadway. 

The roar of an automobile resounded out- 
side, and I knew Pierre was coming. 

"Is it the Germans ?" 

"No, madame, it is my automobile, at 
your service.'' 

She showed no astonishment or perplexity. 
Her mind seemed wholly absorbed in the 
problem of the sick child. "Take me in 
your automobile to the child, monsieur," 
she replied rapidly, speaking in French. 
"Let us hurry, hurry!" 

"But where, madame?" 

"I do not know, monsieur, but I will show 
you. There! There!" She waved her hand 
in the direction of Gheel. 

We hurried like fugitives from the house 
and into the tonneau, leaving the awe-struck 
peasants standing with mouths agape. Pierre 
stared in consternation at our coming, but 
said no word. I did not try to explain. 
Our passenger sat tense, her head turned 

[is! 



Tales From a Famished Land 

to one side as if she were listening 
closely. 

We came quickly to a fork of the road. 
"Which way, monsieur ?" Pierre asked. 

"I do not know. It is for madame to 
say," I answered. 

She was quiet for an instant. "To the 
right hand," she exclaimed suddenly. "Make 
haste! There! In that house!" 

The car jerked to a stop, and I leaped 
out to help madame to the ground. Now 
that we had arrived, to my astonishment she 
made no move to leave the car. Her head 
sank slowly forward to her breast, and she 
sat huddled listlessly, paying no attention 
to Pierre or me. 

"Is it this house, madame?" I asked, 
hoping to arouse her. 

"This house," she said, "but we are too 
late." 

"But no, madame!" I exclaimed. "Go 
quickly and help!" At the moment I be- 
lieved in her supernatural powers as firmly 
as any peasant of the Campine. 
[16] 



Saint Dympnas Miracle 

She lifted her head. A sad light had come 
into her eyes. "It is too late. The avenger 
of Belgium is not to come from this house, ,, 
she muttered. 

"But yes! Hurry!" 

The madness of my words did not occur 
to me until days afterward: the lunacy of 
thinking either that she could heal, or that 
the child of these poor peasant-folk when 
healed would avenge his nation on her ene- 
mies. God knows what wild thoughts were 
in my mind that night! God knows, and 
Saint Dympna! 

"I will go in then," she said, rising, giving 
her hand with a queenly gesture, and step- 
ping from the car. "Thank you, monsieur. 
You need not wait; indeed you must not 
wait. I am here with friends. Adieu!" 

She clutched my arm in a sudden spasm of 
fright. 

"Listen!" she whispered. 

A piercing wail rose from the quiet cot- 
tage; a dull lamp flared as it was borne 
hastily past a window; a man's deep voice 
[i7l 



Tales From a Famished Land 

groaned horribly. Children in the loft, 
wakened by the outcry, began to scream, 
and a startled dog far away howled in terror. 
Madame released my arm and walked 
slowly toward the house of death. At the 
door she turned and looked back at us as if 
she feared to go in. Her left hand fumbled 
for the latch; her right waved our dismissal. 
"Adieu, monsieur, adieu," she called in a 
strained, unhappy tone. And we drove 
quietly away and left her under the placid 
moon. 



ti8J 



II 

LOVE IN A BARGE 

A LITTLE Spitz ran back and forth on 
/% the deck of the lighter Cornells de 
A. JL Vriendt, barking defiance at all the 
world and especially at me for my efforts to 
come aboard. Two fat Flemish babies clad 
only in shirts and no underclothes sat in the 
bow watching him. 

"Hay, skipper," I shouted, "where are 
you ? Call off your dog ! " 

A gigantic shock of red hair appeared 
from the cabin, followed by a long face, 
prodigiously wrinkled, and a thin body in 
blue shirt and nondescript trousers, from 
which protruded broad red hands and naked 
feet. Like the babies, the captain stared at 
me in silence and made no move to come 
nearer. 

[19] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Are you the skipper ?" I demanded, los- 
ing patience. 

"J a, mynheer." 

"Call off your dog. I'm the American 
delegate of the Relief Committee." 

"What, mynheer?" 

I aimed a kick at the dancing, barking 
bundle of fur and feet, lost my balance on 
the edge of the wharf, and came down on the 
sloping deck of the Cornells de Vriendt on 
all fours. The dog went wild, and the 
frightened babies howled, but the skipper 
watched motionless as before. "What did 
you say, mynheer?" he asked imperturbably. 

It seemed no time for the French or Flem- 
ish languages. In an emotional crisis, such 
as a deathbed repentance or losing one's 
heart or one's temper, the tongue turns to the 
speech of youth, and I fell to cursing in most 
excellent and idiomatic English. The shock- 
head stared. "For God's sake, sir," he ex- 
claimed at last, in English like my own, 
"are you a British spy?" 

"A spy, you idiot? Fm the American 
[20] 



Love in a Barge 

delegate of the Commission for Relief in 
Belgium. What do you mean by staring 
at me like that and letting your crazy dog 
bark his head off at me? I'm the consignee 
of this cargo, and I've come to inspect it." 

The bargeman leaped to the peak of the 
vessel and came forward, his bare toes clutch- 
ing the ridge of the deck, smacked the near- 
est infant into silence, swore at the dog, and 
came down to me. He drew an old cap from 
his pocket and began to clean my clothes, 
using the cap as a dust cloth. "I'm sorry, 
sir," he said meekly, "but you see, sir, I has 
to be careful, wot with the Germans and 
all." 

"With that accent I should think you 
would have to be careful," I retorted grimly. 

"Ow no, sir," he returned, "I'm a Belgian 
all right-o, but I 'ave served my time in the 
British navy." 

"And now you're skipper of a barge!" 

He smiled and scratched his head. "There 
was a woman, sir, as done me into doing it 
— leaving the navy, I mean. 0' course she 

[21] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

wasn't the first woman I ever see, but when 
I saw her I thort she was." 

"Well, you're a funny one!" I exclaimed 
heartily, feeling a sudden kinship with the 
lanky red-crowned scarecrow before me — a 
kinship which would have been impossible 
without our common language. "Is this 
Queen of Sheba still travelling with you?" 

"Beg pardon, sir?" 

"Is your wife on board?" 

"Yes, indeed, sir, and here are two of my 
little shavers." He pointed with extraor- 
dinary pride at the half-naked youngsters 
clinging to their precarious seats on the 
sloping deck. "Fine little fellers, aren't 
they, sir? I've got three children, and there 
is going to be a fourth. These is twins — 
both boys," he said. 

"So I see," I retorted. The jest was lost 
on him. "Well, open up hatches and let's 
look at your cargo." 

He bent to the fastenings and slipped off 
the round lead seals. "Funny thing about 
these Germans, sir, 'ow careful they are. 

[22] 



Love in a Barge 

That Johnny standing sentry-go over there" 
— he pointed to the lonely watch in the dis- 
tance — , *"e always comes up and asks me for 
them little bits of lead. I gives 'em to 'im, 
sir. 'E gets paid for 'em and they don't 
do me no good, so I gives 'em to him." He 
lifted the first hatch, still chatting affably. 
"It's a good lot o' flour, sir, as I sees it. 
Only up at Rotterdam sometimes they has 
to unload too fast, and they piles it into the 
lighters in all kinds o' weather. I've got 
forty-eight bags of bad flour in 'ere myself — 
spoilt by the rain in Rotterdam." 

"We can use it here for making dog bread." 
"They uses 'ooks on the bags, too, sir, 
and that ain't right. Ortn't to use no 'ooks. 
They always break the bags. Still, they're 
a good sort up there, and they treat me right 
so far. . . . Now this flour, sir, it's first 
rate — better than the Belgians is used to, if 
I do say it, and well stowed, ain't it?" He 
dusted the white meal from his hands and 
replaced the hatches. "It ain't bad, is it, 
sir?" 

[23] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Pretty good," I answered. 

"No, I don't regret being skipper on a 
canal boat 'stead of hordinary seaman bang- 
ing 'round in a cruiser's forecastle and target- 
practising at the 'Uns. It's an awful life, 
sea-faring is, sir. A man wot is a man owes 
it to himself to marry and settle down." 

"You certainly are a domestic animal, 
skipper." 

He grinned. "Yes, sir. Why, the first 
time I sawr 'er she was a-standing behind 
the till in a sweets-shop, in Flushing, and 
a-crying 'er pretty eyes out." 

"Who was?" 

"Blimey! my wife! I thort I 'ad told you, 



sir." 



"You've told me nothing." 

"It's an awful life, sea-faring is, sir " 

"You've told me that already, but what 
about your wife?" 

"Ow, yes, sir. She was a-standing behind 

the counter in a sweets-shop and a-crying 

'er pretty eyes out, and I come in just off 

the ship with a 'unger for sweets so strong 

[24] 



Love in a Barge 

my tongue was fair 'anging out of my mouth. 
(You gets that way banging round in a 
cruiser's forecastle, sir.) 

"Sniff— sniff— sniff 'What'll ye 'ave, 

mynheer?' she says to me. 

'"Good-day juffrouw, and what's the mat- 
ter with you, my pretty dear?' I says back 
at her. 'I'll 'ave a kiss,' I says. 

"'You'll 'ave nothing of the sort, you bad 
man,' she says, wiping her eyes and glaring 
at me. 

"'Juffrouw,' I says, free and easy, 'I'm 
just off ship and I'm 'ungry — so 'ungry I 
could fair eat you — and I never see a pretty 
maid crying but I kiss 'er tears away. I 
ain't been drinking either. I ain't a drink- 
ing man.' 

"I was serious for all my glib talk, sir. I 
was that serious as I'd never been in my 
life before; and, between ourselves, sir, though 
I 'ate to admit it, I didn't kiss no tears away 
that day. She wouldn't 'ave it. 

"Wot was she weeping for? She'd just 
lorst 'er sweetheart, sir, that was wot for! 
[25] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

'E was a sheep-faced Dutchman — I sawr 'im 
afterward, I did, and he 'adn't a merit to 
'im. She didn't really love 'im, but she 
thort she did, and that's where I come in 
a-asking for a kiss ! 

"'Oom Jan,' she yells to the back of the 
shop. * Come 'ere and throw out this drunken 
sailor-man.' 

"Lucky for me 'er uncle didn't 'ear 'er, 
so I leans across the counter and I says very 
serious, 'JufFrouw, I love you. Tell me, 
wot's the tears about ?" . . . 

"I tell you, sir," he interrupted his story 
to observe, "in dealing with women tell 
'em the truth first pop. If you love 'em, 
tell 'em so. Lies is all right in dealing man 
to man, but with the wimmen, tell 'em the 
truth. 

"So it wasn't long till we was fair intimate. 
I 'ung 'round 'er shop for three days, I did, 
and then I thort as 'ow I might take a few 
liberties with 'er. 

"'No,' she says, 'nothing of that, George. 
I want to make you a good wife,' she says. 
[26I 



Love in a Barge 

"'Wife/ I says to myself. I was sitting 
in the potaties all right-o, with a quid a 
month and no 'ome ner nothing. Wife ! Wot 
'ave I let myself in for?' But she was that 
simple 'earted I couldn't say no to 'er and I 
loved her fair to distraction. 

"I went back to my ship, but I couldn't 
stand it, so at last I gave it up and went 
to her and we was married in a church and 
set up 'ousekeeping in a barge!" 

A sharp voice from the cabin cut short 
our colloquy. The skipper jumped as if shot. 
"Coming, coming," he called in a very re- 
spectful voice, "coming, my dear!" 

"It's " I left the useless question un- 
finished. I knew it was the Queen of Sheba, 
the heroine of the sweets-shop in Flushing, 
the Mrs. Noah of the barge. 

"Yes, it's my wife. A strong bellus she 
has, sir: good lungs; and the little shavers 
has 'em, too." He pointed to the babies on 
the deck. "Sea-faring men needs good lungs, 
you know, sir. But my lads don't seem to 
take much to salt water, sir. They prefers 
[27] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

canals. They gets sick on the Hollandsch 
Diep. Can't make sailor-men o' them, sir." 

"Sailor-men !" I retorted. "What about 
that cruiser's forecastle talk you were giving 
me, and marrying and settling down? Were 
you joking with me, skipper? Isn't love in 
a barge all it's cracked up to be?" 

"No, sir; yes, sir," he said, answering both 
my questions at once but pulling a very sober 
face. "A man what is a man owes it to his- 
self to marry and settle down. But a lad, 
now! that's another question, sir. I tell you, 
sir, confidential-like, I'm going to name the 
next lad after Sir David Beatty!" 

"Whew!" I whistled. "And if the lad is 
a girl?" 

"I'll name her 'Rule Brittania,' sir — if my 
wife agrees. . . . Coming, coming, my dear; 
coming," he called. "Good day, sir; thank 
you, sir." 



28 



Ill 

THE ODYSSEY OF MR. SOLSLOG 

YOU-ALL are in charge of the Relief 
Commission, suh? I am Mistah 
Solslog, of Alabama. I'm lookin* 
for my sistah." 

The tense blue eyes of my fellow-country- 
man stared at me searchingly, and I at him. 
He wore a rubber collar and a false shirt 
front of a style which afforded popular sub- 
jects for caricature twenty-five years ago. 
His salt-and-pepper suit was cheap, horribly 
cheap, thin, cotton, summer weight, but 
immaculate. His hat — an old, well-brushed 
Stetson — was in his hand. He had no 
luggage. In the cold winter light of my 
office in Antwerp his slight, lean features 
looked prematurely aged, but neither age 
nor hardship had changed the character- 
istically even Southern drawl. 
[29] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Sit down, Mr. Solslog," I said. "We're 
feeding eleven hundred thousand Belgians 
here, and clothing and giving work, too, but 
an American citizen certainly has a claim." 

His face reddened. "Thank you, suh, 
but it ain't that sort of help I reequiah, 
Preehaps you did not understand me. I'm 
a-lookin' for my sistah." 

"Yes?" 

"She was in Maubeuge when the war 
broke out." He pronounced it Maw-booge. 
"She was a governess, suh. I read in the 
Atlanta Constitution that war was declared. 
That was on a Sunday. I quit my job in 
the lumberyard an' come straight over here 
on the old Saint Paul, and I ain't found her 
— not yet." 

"But, Mr. Solslog, it's February now. 
You left America in August?" 

"Yes, suh," he said gently. "I come in 
August." 

"Where have you been, then, in the mean- 
time?" I demanded. 

"Well, suh, first I went to Maw-booge." 
[30] 



The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 

"The Germans captured Maubeuge on 
August 27th; they took the fortress on Sep- 
tember 6th. " 

"Yes, suh. I know they did. I was 
there. You don't quite understand me. I 
was lookin' for my sistah." 

The man amazed, angered, and puzzled 
me. Common-sense told me that the Ger- 
mans allowed no one — least of all a stray 
American — to wander into Belgium, inside 
the German lines, on the flimsy excuse of 
"looking for his sister," but here was just such 
a man. Worst of all, he really seemed simple 
and candid: the more dangerous as a spy, 
probably, though what he was to spy upon 
I had not the ghost of an idea. 

" Sprechen Sie Deutsch, Herr Solslog? Wa- 
rum sind Sie hier in Belgien ? Sind Sie 
Spion ? Vous parlez Franqais, nest-ce pas ? 
Vous etes e spion, oui ? y ut U Veaamsch k lap- 
pen ?" I shot at him rapidly. 

He smiled a smile which disarmed my sus- 
picions, a pathetic, whimsical, puzzled smile. 
"People are always sayin* things to me I 
[31] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

cain't understand in these here foreign coun- 
tries. No, suh, I don't understand any 
language but plain You-nited States. I can 
say 'uh franc, doo franc' — that's French, 
you know, suh — and I know 'Muhsoor', 
that's French for 'Mistah' and 'my sistah.' 
I'll never forget that word. 

"It's like this, suh: I got up almost to 
Maw-booge — oh, yes, suh, I had a pass. 
I got up there with the French. Just walked 
along with 'em; they couldn't understand 
me; I couldn't understand them, but we 
walked along. Then we got 'most to Maw- 
booge where my sistah was — red roofs, like 
all them pretty towns in France — I could see 
the town, fightin' everywhere. I was with a 
battery, what they call swasuntcans. The 
officer could speak my language. 

"'Go back,' he says. 'Go with these refugee 
people.' Everybody was runnin' away — the 
fields was full of 'em, dirty and tired, but 
still runnin'. 'Go to Paris,' he says. 

'"But I'm lookin' for my sistah,' I 
says. 

[32] 



The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 

"'She'll most likely be in Paris. Go 
quick/ he says. 

"We was standin' in a poppy field, his 
battery was firing in fours — pop! pop! pop! 
pop ! — like that. A German ae-reoplane come 
over like a big bee and dropped a bomb. 
They screamed and run, everybody did, but 
the bomb busted and nothin' come out but 
powdered lime. Then everybody laughed. 
But in three minutes more the Germans was 
a-droppin' shells all over us. That lime was 
just a marker. 

"They hit my officer friend. 'Git out,' 
he says again to me, 'Git out quick.' His 
fingers dug into the poppies, he was hurt so 
bad; hit in the stomach. Then he kind of 
smiled once and pulled off a poppy flower 
and held it up to me. ' Here's a red poppy — 
the blood of France,' he says. 'Take it as a 
souvenir, and git out.' 

"They got me, though — the Germans did. 
I was in Mardeevay" (I have no idea what 
the name of the town was) "when they come 
in. After all the fightin' I'd seen I went to 

[33l 



Tales From a Famished Land 

sleep in a church, and along come the Ger- 
mans. They was massacreein' the people. 
They wanted to shoot me, too, but one of 
'em understood my lingo and he took me to 
the gen'ral. 'So you're an English spy,' he 
says politely. 'We'll examine you a little 
bit, and then we'll have you shot. Good- 
day,' he says. Then they drug me into a 
little room in the town hall and kep' me there. 
But next day come a man who spoke You- 
nited States; he'd been in Birmingham, 
Alabama — funny, ain't it, how they travel? — 
and he found out I wasn't no spy. 

"Then I went to Paris " 

"You went to Paris from inside the Ger- 
man lines?" 

Mr. Solslog smiled his slow, child-like 
smile. "Yes, suh. It wasn't hard a-tall. 
I was captured by the French. You see, 
suh, it ain't hard to travel about in the 
war so long as the fightin' is goin' on. Them 
French peesants was captured by the Ger- 
mans, then captured by the French, then 
captured by the Germans again, then cap- 

[34] 



The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 

tured by their own people again. It's when 
the armies sits down and quits fightin* on 
their feet that you cain't git around. I 
could a-gone from Berlin right to Paris 
through all the fightin' durin' the first month 
of the war, before the battle of the Marne. 

"Funny thing about that battle. I was 
all through it, and I never knowed till after- 
ward in Paris that it was the battle of the 
Marne. 

"Then I got to Paris. Paris was awful, 
half dead, Zeppelins comin' over most every 
night, government in Bordoo. I got to the 
Embassy " 

"Mr. Solslog," I interrupted, "how on 
earth did you get about knowing not a word 
of French?" 

"Oh, I made mistakes, in course. But an 
American can do anything, suh; can git 
anywhere he has a mind to, I mean. They 
was always some one who could say a few 
words of my language — English Tommies, 
American reporters — they was everywhere I 



went." 



35 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"But money?" 

"I had a hundred and forty francs when 
I got to Paris. I paid for everything," he 
said proudly, "and they never cheated me 
so's I could notice it. They're great people, 
the Frenchies. Once I worked for 'em two 
weeks in one of their field hospitals, just be- 
cause I liked 'em. ' Muhsoor luh American,' 
they called me. 'Muhsoor' — that's French 

for 'Mistah' and 'my sis But I told you 

that beefore. 

"I got a pass from the Embassy " 

"How did you do that?" 

"I told 'em about my sistah. They 
hadn't had word about her, so I got the pass. 
Then I got a pass from General Caselnow 
and went to the front." His tired eyes 
gleamed restlessly as he went on. "You- 
all here cain't imagine it, I reckon, how dirty 
it is and how it stinks. War is mostly bad 
smells. The men cain't wash, they're covered 
with live things, flies is awful, rotten horses 
and rotten men have to lie about, sometimes 
for weeks, till people can bury 'em. Sol- 

[36] 



The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 

diers marching through a town you can smell 
for blocks sometimes. 

"I got arrested, in course, but the Frenchies 
is always kind. It's the English is hard. 
They locked me up in Calais; wouldn't lis- 
ten to me. I told 'em about my sistah, 
but they only laughed. They let me write 
to the Embassy, though, and Mr. Herrick 
made 'em release me. That was in Novem- 
ber, I think, and I hadn't had word of my 
sistah. 

"Then I went to London on an empty 
horse transport. They knew I was stowed 
away on it, all right, and it was 'gainst orders, 
so they chased me — tried to find me all 
night. The transport was awful dirty after 
all them horses had been in it, but I had to 
git to London to see if they had got word of 
my sistah. I slid down a ventilator and lit 
in a horse stall. It half killed me: knocked 
me plum out and sprained my back so's I 
couldn't run no more. They come a-snoopin' 
round with lanterns, right up into the stall, 
till the light fell plum on my face. I didn't 

[37] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

hardly breathe, but my hurt back seemed 
broken right through, so I says, 'Here I 
am/ An' they found me. 

"They talk a queer kind of language, the 
English do: it's a little like ours, and they're 
more like us Americans than the Frenchies, 
or the Dutchmen, or the Germans. They 
helped me up, cussed me out a lot; but they 
got hot water and bathed my back, and one 
of 'em, a dirty hostler from Chelsea, he 
bedded me down for the rest of the night 
and give me tobacco. So I got along all 
right. They smuggled me off. 

"Mr. Page's secretary in London told me 
they hadn't heard of my sistah, and he sent 
me to see Hoover's committee — the com- 
mittee to send Americans home, preehaps 
you know. It was about closed up, but 
I didn't want to go home, not without my 
sistah, and they hadn't any word of her, so 
I went back to the Embassy. They was 
a man there. I misrecollect his name now, 
he was very good to me. He told me to go 
home. I says I wouldn't — without my 

[38] 



The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 

sistah I wouldn't, so he helped me to git 
over to Holland. Oh, I forgot to tell you, 
suh, I was sick in London; had some kind of 
fever and stayed in the hospital two months. 
It hurts me still here," he pointed solemnly 
at his forehead. "I had awful dreams: 
dreamed that the Germans had caught my 
sistah — they had her in a little house, and 
she was screamin'." His eyes lighted dread- 
fully. "You-all cain't understand it, pree- 
haps, but I hear her screamin' 'most every 
night and sometimes in the daytime if I 
ain't feeling very well. Listen! Listen, suh! 
I'm huntin' for my sistah, and you-all must 
help me! You-all's got to help me, or I'll — I'll 
■ — I'll go crazy — I'll kill somebody!" 

The soft Southern drawl mounted to a 
shriek, and my visitor had me by the throat. 
I fought him off desperately. His sickness 
had weakened him, or else he would have 
throttled me. Suddenly his hands relaxed, 
his eyes lost their light, and he spoke again 
in the slow, gentle voice he had first 
used: 

[39] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"You-all must pardon me, suh. I — I'm 
right ashamed of myself. I've spoiled your 
tie." He deftly rearranged the crumpled 
folds before I could interfere. "I — I reckon 
I'm not quite reesponsible when I think of — 
of things that might have happened. It's 
seven months, suh, and I ain't had word of 
my sistah." He drew out a tattered paper, 
stamped with many stamps, sealed with 
many seals, and showed me a line in German 
script. 

"To look for his sister, reported to be in 
Maubeuge at the beginning of the war." 

"I cain't read what the German says," 
he observed quietly. 

"To go to Antwerp, Brussels, Mons, 
Charleroi, Maubeuge, Dinant, Namur, Liege," 
I translated aloud, "to look for his sister." 

Months later Mr. Solslog came again. 
There is a gentleman in the reception 
room waiting for monsieur: an American 
gentleman " Leon shrugged his shoul- 
ders expressively, spread out his palms, 
[40] 



The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 

and went on in a rapid whisper: "He 
asked for monsieur. Nothing else could 
I understand. He has waited for monsieur 
four hours, and he talks, talks to himself 
always!" 

From the hall I heard a steady gentle 
voice talking, talking, talking. "Mr. Sol- 
slog/' I hailed him. The voice stopped. 
He must have stepped swiftly from the thick 
carpet to the tiled floor of the hall, for he 
came like a man running. 

"You-all here, sun," he asked, without 
an interrogative lift to the question. "Let 
me — let me hold on to your hand for a minute. 
I — I'm right glad to see you. They've just 
— IVe just got out." He gathered his voice 
and breath for a tremendous effort. His 
next sentence came like a blast of prophecy. 
"Oh, may God damn the Germans!" he 
screamed. 

"Leon," I shouted, "bring brandy, quick!" 

"Oh, no, suh; not for me. I don't use 
it." Mr. Solslog gently released my hands 
and walked beside me into the reception 

[41] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

room. His face was whiter than before, 
the lines in it deeper, and the pathetic, patient 
eyes stranger than when I had seen him last; 
but the fever fit of passion passed and left 
him calm as usual. 

"I haven't found my sistah — it isn't 
that," he explained in his slow, drawling 
voice. "I've jist got out of prison here in 
Antwerp, suh. I told the German officer 
if I ever see him again I'll kill him. Fm 
going to kill him if I ever see him again. 
I'm going to " 

"Yes, yes," I said soothingly. The monoto- 
nous recitative I had heard on first enter- 
ing the house had begun. 

"I told him I'd kill him, I'd kill him, suh, 
kill him, I'd kill him " 

"But your sister?" 

"Oh, yes." He gathered himself together. 
"I went to Brussels and Charleyroy — I say 
I'll kill him — and Maw-booge. She ain't 
there — at none of those places. I dream 
about her all the time, I see her and hear 
her. Preehaps you don't altogether under- 

[42] 



The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 

stand me. Suh — they're chokin' her — and 
— and mistreatin' her, the Germans are, 
suh; and she's callin' to me — screamin' 
and callin' — I told him I'd kill him! Then I 
come back to Malines. I got a paper from 
the burgomaster to go out and see 'em diggin' 
up the dead Belgian soldiers and buryin' 
'em in new cemeteries." Some wild, morbid 
impulse must have led him to do this thing. 
"And the Germans caught me, suh. They 
said my passport was expired. I cain't read 
German, suh, so how was I to know? They 
drug me up here to Antwerp, and a German 
officer — I told him I'd kill him — and in the 
police place, he said I was an English spy. 
They stripped me, suh. They searched 
my skin. They took photygraphs of my 
clothes and looked at my collar against a 
light. They even went over my money with 
a microscope and looked under my hair to 
see if anything was tattooed on to me. I 
told that officer I'd kill him! 

"'Where is your baggage?' he says. 

"'I haven't got any.' 

[43] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"'You damned spy' — I told him I'd kill 
him — 'you dirty spy/ he says. 

"'I'm just as clean as you are,' I told him. 
'I buy a shirt when I need it. I reckon I'm 
as clean as you, and I'll kill you!' 

"He jumped at me and beat me with his 
fists. Til kill you ! Some day I'll kill you/ 
I says. They wouldn't let me sleep; hectored 
me for two nights, but Til kill you,' I says 
to him. Til "' 

He rose to his feet and faced me, then his 
knees sagged, and slowly, very slowly, he 
fell over in a dead faint. 

There is little to add to this strange 
tale. The wilder wanderings of a sick 
mind followed the wild wanderings of his 
broken body. He was lodged in a private 
house where he had good care, but his 
case was hopeless from the start. About 
a month before his death I received 
a note written in his own hand. It read : 

"They says I am vury sick but I doo not 
beleeve them in a few days moor I am gooen 

[44] 



The Odyssey of Mr. Solslog 

back to Mawbooj. I beleeve my sister is 
there still goodbie. 

Yurs truly 

Mr. Solslog." 
His sister was never found. 



[4Sl 



IV 

FIGURES OF THE DANCE 

THE poet finished his recitation and 
resumed his cigarette, waiting for 
our applause. 
"It is a man absolutely extraordinary," 
murmured the dancing-master across the 
table at my left, under cover of the hand- 
clapping. "He is the greatest poet of Bel- 
gium, monsieur. Verhaeren, Cammaerts, 
Maeterlinck — they are nothing. If you bring 

him an album — presto! he writes you an 

d' »» 
e in it. 

In the tight little supper-room over the 

Cafe de la Toisond 'Or we were sweltering 

and dining at the expense of McTeague. It 

was a night in August, and the heat of noon 

had not yet died out of the boulevards and 

streets of Brussels, ville basse. The cheap 

[46] 



Figures of the Dance 

cotton curtains at the two windows fronting 
on the avenue waved languidly to and fro, 
and the air of the room reeked with ciga- 
rette smoke and the odours of Belgian cook- 
ing. 

McTeague sat at the table's head — a 
huge, lonely, unsophisticated American, with 
a mop of gray hair topping a face like a 
child's, tired eyes, slightly Roman nose, 
and what once was a rose-bud mouth. At 
his right was Yvette, the dancer of the 
Scala; pretty, of course, the big, muscular, 
operatic-soprano type of beauty rather than 
the petite beings we usually think of in the 
dance; sleek, serpentine, appraising the world 
about her. Next her was I; then Yvette's 
husband, the poet; then Guilbert, her dancing- 
master. 

"Thanks! thanks! I thank you infinitely, 
monsieur. Bravo! Bis, bis!" said McTeague, 
in his heavy Scotian French. 

"No, no, monsieur," the poet answered 
gloomily, shaking his head. "I demand 
pardon, but no." 

[47] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Ah, it is the war, then! You feel such a 
sadness that you cannot be gay, monsieur ?" 

"No, it is not the war. What is the war? 
It is of nations. For me nations are noth- 
ing: men, men — Pushkin, Byron, Whitman, 
Schiller, Napoleon, Goethe, Victor Hugo — 
those for me are worth while. The rest? Pah!" 

"Oh, la, la, la, la!" 

"Do not mind, monsieur," the dancing- 
master whispered ecstatically, as if he feared 
such sentiments might offend me, "it is a 
poet, nest-ce pas? Art — art — that is a 
world of itself." He mopped his forehead, 
beaded with drops of perspiration, his little 
black eyes rolled in his head, and he drummed 
on the tablecloth as if his fingertips would 
do the office of his toes. The man was 
a genuine enthusiast. To dance and to 
teach others to dance — that was life! 

"Yvette, you have brought your ballet 
costume so you can dance for messieurs the 
Americans?" he asked. 

"Yes, my old Guilbert," she answered 
languidly. 

[48] 



Figures of the Dance 

"Come, then." 

We drained our coffee cups reluctantly, 
rose from the table, and stirred out into the 
hot passageway, Yvette and McTeague ahead, 
old Guilbert following with me, the poet trail- 
ing behind. Through little winding streets, 
dusky, sleepy, and sweltering we passed, 
and at length out beside the Maison du Roi 
and the golden Flemish splendours of the 
corporation halls and the Hotel de Ville on 
the Grand' Place. We wound through the 
lines of German sentries and up the steps of 
a new restaurant — the Cafe du Cid — up 
dirty, twisting stairs behind the bar rail, to 
the dancing-hall where Guilbert taught. 

"Now," he exclaimed in rapture, turning 
on his toes with a movement of astonishing 
grace for one so old and fat. "Monsieur 
le poete to the piano! Madame Yvette to 
the dressing-room, quick! Messieurs les 
Americains, seat yourselves, if you please! 
Quick! Quick! Quick! Everybody! 

"Messieurs!" He flung up his fingers 
and addressed us as we sank languidly into 

[49] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

chairs before the open windows. "It is a 
dance which I have myself composed — 
the dance of the ourang-outang. I am he — 
the great man-ape. I dance so. . . . 
Music !" he called to the poet at the piano. 
" Music ! Moussorgsky — slow — terrible — 
so! 

The poet smote the ivory keys, keys yel- 
low as the teeth of an old horse, and the 
dance began solo. Old Guilbert swayed and 
leaped over the dusty floor under the hanging 
lamps — swayed and leaped heavily, horribly, 
bestially, while the wild music of the piano 
panted and coughed through the room. The 
hot night air doubtless added to the grim 
effect on McTeague and me. I seemed to 
breathe the very exhalations of a jungle, and 
watched as if fascinated the contortions of 
the dancing-master. 

As he danced he roared explanations and 
orders. "It is a forest, messieurs, and I, 
the ourang-outang, I dance in the moon- 
light under the trees, so, and so, and so; 
and as I dance I long for something to love, 
[So] 



Figures of the Dance 

something to destroy. I am seeking here, 
there, as I dance. . . . Ah! I have 
found her — there, there!" 

He made an extraordinary succession of 
leaps toward Madame Yvette's dressing- 
room, and suddenly she floated out before 
us, her heavy body spinning on her toes, 
light as a cloud and almost as swift; her 
eyes half closed, her hands at her breast, a 
Liberty cap on her head; and at the end of 
her turn she sank quietly into a heap in the 
middle of the floor. 

Guilbert's horrid dance began again, and 
the rapid flow of his explanation: "She is 
asleep, messieurs, this fay in the forest." 
He paused ecstatically before her. "I have 
found her, I love her, I will have her, I shall 
win her by my dancing." He touched her 
on the breast. She leaped to her feet and 
spun across the floor like a whirlwind, terror 
and amazement and grace and voluptuous- 
ness all portrayed in her movements. The 
ape leaped after her, dancing round and 
round her, enmeshing her like a firefly in a 

[51] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

cage of grass. Her eyes grew wider with 
terror, she danced this way and that, try- 
ing to escape him; he seized her, and she 
flew to right and left, still fast in his clutches; 
she leaped straight up, and he caught her 
firmly in his arms and yelled, actually yelled, 
with delight. 

And then — it seems utterly impossible even 
as I tell it — into the music came a wild, un- 
holy burst of "The Watch on the Rhine." 
The two figures on the floor leaped and cur- 
veted. A hoarse cheer rose to us from out- 
side, and below the windows I saw three 
ecstatic German soldiers swaying and bellow- 
ing applause. . . . The ape held the 
forest-fay securely as they danced. . . . 
It must have been the music which first 
warned me of change, for into the German 
hymn stole a wilder motif — the great chords 
of an alien theme intruded, fought, con- 
quered, and swept over the fragments of 
the old, and like a wild mob of music burst- 
ing from prisons of silence poured forth 
the "Marseillaise." The dance was sym- 
JS2] 



Figures of the Dance 

bolic, then: Germany and Europe! The 
conquest of the world! . . . The knit 
figures still swayed and leaped, but the ape 
was weakening. The taller figure of the 
woman slowly dominated and then sub- 
merged the male. With a sudden thrust 
she flung him prone, but the music went on. 
There came a howl at our backs, and I saw 
the soldiers in the square below waving their 
rifles and dancing with anger. 

McTeague stared as if he were just re- 
covering from a trance, shook himself clum- 
sily, and muttered through the "Marseillaise" : 
"Strange, isn't it, how artistic these Belgians 
are? Now if you and I were arranging a 
dance " 

The loud howls of the Germans beneath us 
interrupted McTeague's moralizings. Swift 
feet were upon the stair, the proprietor of 
the cafe and his wife burst in upon us, 
weeping, gesticulating, talking all at once. 
Guilbert lay quietly in the middle of the 
floor, still acting his part; the poet at the 
piano pounded lustily. Yvette, more prac- 

[S3l 



Tales From a Famished Land 

tical than they, ran to a window at the back 
of the hall and looked out, then ran back to 
us and grasped us. "Come quickly," she 
exclaimed. "We can escape before the Ger- 
mans come." 

"But your husband, and Guilbert?" I 
asked. 

"Drag them behind us, then," she replied, 
shrugging her naked shoulders. "Come at 
once. The Germans are on the stair!" 

Directly beneath our feet we heard a 
tumult of rough voices, a clatter of dishes 
and pans, and then tramping boots coming 
up the winding stair. Panic seized on Mc- 
Teague and me simultaneously. We leaped 
at the performers and hustled them across 
the floor behind the twinkling feet of the 
dancing-girl. Before we reached the window 
she had already scrambled through it and 
dropped to a roof five or six feet below. We 
leaped after her and ran across a space slop- 
ing like a deck. Guilbert and the poet had 
not yet spoken a word. I had begun to 
laugh — a wild, hysterical laugh which irri- 

[54] 



Figures of the Dance 

tated McTeague, so that while we ran he 
remonstrated with me: "Germans — '11 hear 
— come after us," he panted. "What — 's 
matter — now?" 

Yvette stopped abruptly before a white- 
washed wall and gazed up at an open window 
three feet above the level of her head. 

"Lift me up, messieurs," she whispered, 
catching her breath. 

"Why?" I demanded. 

"Quick! We must escape this way." 

"Jamais de la vie I" I stuttered. "It's 
right to escape, but I won't be caught break- 
ing and entering somebody's house." 

"But quick!" 

"No!" 

"But I know this room," she sobbed. 
"I have the right." 

"You have what?" 

"The right to enter. Mon Dieu! Cest 
la chambre de mon ami, messieurs /" 

Nothing is stranger than truth; nothing 
more grotesque, more dramatic, more truly 

lSS) 



Tales From a Famished Land 

unreal. I can imagine how this revelation 
would have been received on the stage in 
any of the five continents: the gestures of 
the outraged husband, the tableau of the 
horrified perceptor, and the amazement of 
the guests. But clinging to our precarious 
footing on the roof, we received it only as a 
stroke of luck — a means of escape from our 
awful predicament. We thanked Heaven for 
Yvette's lover! 

"Up with her!" I hissed at the poet. 
"Stoop down, man, and I'll lift her into the 
room." 

He leaned obediently against the bricks. 
I grasped the dancer firmly by the sole of 
her soft dancing buskin and boosted her 
against the wall, the poet clumsily bent 
lower still, and she clambered over him to 
the window sill. Scraping, gasping, strug- 
gling, she reached it, slipped her arms over 
the sill, and rose. There was a flutter of 
stifF dancing skirt, her twinkling, white-clad 
legs and feet slipped over the ledge and out 
of sight. Then came a pause. McTeague 

[56] 



Figures of the Dance 

and I stared at each other soberly. "Hm!" 
he breathed deeply. "Hm! Hm!" 

Her head, with the Liberty cap ridiculously 
awry, peeped over the window ledge. "It's 
all right. He isn't here. I'll help you in, 
messieurs," Yvette said calmly, and in two 
minutes more we stood beside her in the 
unlighted bedroom of her ami. 

"Follow," she said. "If you please. Here 
is my hand.". 

In single file we tiptoed across the room 
and reached the door. I heard the knob 
turn softly; a rush of hot air streamed over 
our perspiring faces, we pattered out to 
a landing from which descended another 
flight of stairs, and stood breathlessly listen- 
ing. The night seemed to pant with the 
heat, the dull heavy noises of life spoke 
behind closed doors, and far away I heard 
the tramp of a squad of soldiers off to relieve 
the guard. 

"Come," said Yvette softly. "It would 
not do for my friend to find us here, riest-ce 
"pas ? One of you, messieurs, he might mis- 

[57] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

take for a rival!" I am afraid I laughed as 
she said this; for McTeague, who usually 
treated me with great respect, laid his hot 
moist hand on my mouth. "Hush!" he 
said. "You mustn't laugh at her. You 
mustn't approve. These people don't look 

at these things as we do. They're unmor " 

A door slammed in the darkness below 
us, and the scrape of heavy boots echoed 
from the stair-well! " Mon Dieu /" Yvette 
whispered. "It is he! It must be he! 
Here!" She leaped back into the gloom, 
hustling us with her, and crouched in the 
farthest corner of the hall. McTeague was 
first in the line; then I; then the poet; then 
Guilbert; then Yvette. The heavy tread 
of the newcomer sounded louder and louder, 
but no louder than the anguished beating 
of our hearts. He reached the top of the 
stair. An odour of Iambic or faro scented 
the fetid air. We could see in the dark- 
ness an immense bulk, and Yvette trembled. 
It was her that he must have heard, for even 
while his hand was on the knob, he turned. 

[58] 



Figures of the Dance 

"Hello, old fellow," he called jocularly. 
"What have you got there? Let me see?" 

In the vague semi-darkness I saw Mc- 
Teague scramble slowly to his feet. I thought 
he would surrender at discretion, but the 
sound of his voice disillusioned and astonished 
me. "Go into that room, you villain," he 
roared, advancing on the friendly inebriate and 
bawling fit to wake the dead. "Go in! Go in!" 

His voice or his impressive advance fright- 
ened Yvette's friend. The door banged 
open; there was a short pause; then it slammed 
shut and I could hear a panting, frightened 
human mass flung hard against it to keep out 
the intruder. 

"Go away, you dirty Germans!" bawled 
a muffled voice. "Sales Bodies!" 

McTeague gripped the handle of the door 
and tried to turn it, but Yvette — more wise 
than he — clutched him about the waist and 
flung him with all her force toward the stair. 
"Hurry, hurry, we must run!" she sobbed. 
"Hurry, hurry!" And we charged down 
the dark well. 

[S9l 



Tales From a Famished Land 

At the door we peered cautiously out. 
No one had been aroused. The hot night 
breathed about us as softly as a sleeping child, 
ignorant, indifferent, and calm. Tragedy, 
comedy, farce — we had played them all un- 
wittingly, and no one knew or cared but we! 

An old herdick hitched to a decrepit 
horse stood in the shadow of the street 
corner! We thrust Yvette, Guilbert, and 
the poet into its shelter and waved them 
good-night. " Au revolt, messieurs!' 1 the 
three called to us gaily. 

"Adieu!" McTeague responded. "It is 
not au revoir: it is good-bye!" Then he 
added, sotto voce, to me, "They are true 
artists — unmoral — like marionettes — just fig- 
ures of the dance, aren't they? . . . 
Come!" he said, after a pause. "They have 
forgotten it already, but we must go back to 
the Cafe du Cid and get the proprietor out 
of this scrape. Right?" 

"Right," I responded. And we slowly 
followed the creaking herdick down the 
narrow street. 

[60] 



THE SAVIOUR OF MONT CESAR 

RAIN fell softly, as it frequently falls 
in Belgium, drenching the ripening 
^ fields of Brabant and the ghosts of 
ruined towns. By six o'clock in the evening 
we had reached Louvain. My motor-car 
rolled through the porte de Bruxelles and 
down the narrow, slippery Flemish streets 
into the heart of the city. From a sentry 
box marked with barber-pole stripes in the 
German colours — black, white, red; black, 
white, red again — a bearded Landsturm man 
leaped out, wearing a helmet like a Yoho- 
ghany miner's cap, a faded gray-green service 
uniform, and high, mud-coloured boots. 
The car skidded past him over the moist 
cobblestones. "Halt!" he shouted, waving 
his rifle; but I flaunted my celluloid-covered 
[61] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

pass-case at him and yelled in tourist Ger- 
man, "Amerikanische Hilfskomite," and he 
nodded and crawled back into his shelter. 

It was the first anniversary of the destruc- 
tion of Louvain. 

Before the majestic Hotel de Ville — its six 
slender open towers riding high like a stranded 
ship in a waste of ruins — sole relic of the old 
glories of Louvain's Grand' Place, Pierre 
stopped the car and looked back at me in- 
quiringly. 

"I shall spend the night at Mont Cesar, 
Pierre." 

"Good, monsieur." 

"Go to the Kommandantur and ask the 
commandant for a garage for the Relief 
Commission's car." 

"Good." 

"I shall walk to the monastery," I added 
in response to his unspoken question. "You 
may go now." 

"Pardon, but is monsieur to assist at the 
ceremony in memory of the saviour of Mont 
Cesar?" 

[62I 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

"What saviour, Pierre ?" 

"Monsieur has not heard — the German 
officer who saved the monastery: the Prus- 
sian who would not burn the monastery, 
although he was so ordered. Monsieur 
has not heard ?" 

"Nonsense, Pierre," I laughed. "What 
foolishness is this?" 

"Si, si, si, monsieur ! It is true," he 
insisted vehemently, "every word. I swear 
it. He would not burn the monastery, that 
German; and so to-night and for one hundred 
years the monks sing and march in pro- 
cession for him." 

"Go find a garage!" I ordered in disgust. 
The idea of Belgian monks holding service 
for a German was absurd. Chauffeur tales, 
I had found, while often interesting, were 
not always true. "Pierre must think me a 
fool indeed to tell me such a stupid false- 
hood," I thought, as I went grumblingly up 
the street. 

Dusk and the gray rain fell together, cover- 
ing the gray city with an impenetrable 

[6 3 ] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

shroud. Ghostly walls and empty balconies, 
bricks, ashes, gaunt wooden fences to hide 
the worst of the ruins; a stray dog which 
snapped as he ran past; women with black 
shawls over their bent heads hurrying along 
the street; a file of stodgy German Landsturm 
plodding through the rain — these things I 
saw as I walked through the city where 
Lipsius had taught, the city which had been 
the home of learning and art and the seat 
of Catholic piety for more than five cen- 
turies, the city whose ruin is one of many 
eternal blots on the 'scutcheon of Germany. 

I climbed up past the tall stately hill 
called Mont Cesar — a height on which local 
legend says Caesar built a camp and a for- 
tress — where the dour, unbeautiful mon- 
astery of Mont Cesar broods over the 
wrecked city. 

The "pater hospitalism Jan Heynderyckx, 
greeted me with grave pleasure. He was 
not old, yet the beard which just touched 
the breast of his Benedictine habit was al- 
most white, his eyes were gray and tired, 

[6 4 ] 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

and his skin, in the fluttering candlelight, 
was like the vellum of mediaeval manuscripts. 
I had an odd fancy that his face was a perfect 
transcript of his life, limned by the hands of 
life and death, fear, ecstasy, hope, ambition, 
love, and hate. He bowed me into a small 
reception room at the right of the arched 
door and went for sherry and tobacco. Far 
away, from the chapel, came the faint thun- 
der of bass voices chanting a service. It 
echoed and re-echoed through the hollow 
halls, roaring and subsiding like distant 
waves. The monks were singing litanies for 
the murdered city. 

The room where I sat was curious; little 
larger than a closet. On the four walls 
hung old oil paintings of fathers-superior of 
the Benedictine order: Dom Pothier, Dom 
Schmitt, Dom Egbert — sombre, saintly men 
whose bones long since were dust. But over 
the wooden mantel opposite me hung a framed 
photograph. It amused and fascinated me 
— that one touch of modernity in the bleak 
monastic hall — and I stared at it dreamily. 
[65] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Ah, the photograph, monsieur i" The 
monk had entered quietly and stood beside 
me. He, too, gazed at the picture, while 
his hands poured the wine and set forth 
Turkish cigarettes. "To your good health, 
monsieur le Delegue. The photograph?" 
He took a huge pinch of snuff, flourished his 
handkerchief, and breathed noisily. "You 
may look at it if you wish." 

"A thousand thanks, brother," I answered 
indifferently, rising and going toward the 
little frame. The monk followed me, catch- 
ing up a flickering candle and holding it 
close to the glass for me to see the better. 

"My God!" I almost shouted the words 
in my astonishment. "It is a German 
officer!" The picture before us was a cheap 
cabinet photograph of a lieutenant of in- 
fantry, evidently a Prussian, his crop head 
showing beneath his cap, his steady, narrow 
eyes gazing straight into ours! His right 
cheek was slashed with Schmizzes of student 
duels; his hard mouth was half covered with 
bristling moustaches, and the white and black 
166 1 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

ribbon of the Iron Cross, second class, peeped 
from his buttonhole. "Mahn, Ober-Leut- 
nant" I read, written across the lower half 
of the photograph with a military flourish, 
and under it in fine Flemish script in another 
hand, "The saviour of Mont Cesar, Louvain, 
August, 1914." 

"Monsieur is puzzled?" 

"Puzzled? I am thunder-struck! Is this 
Belgium, or is it Germany, brother?" 

Father Jan gazed at me sorrowfully. "You 
do not yet understand. This is still Belgium, 
and God will punish the guilty. Listen, 
monsieur, you understand Latin?" He 
pointed down the corridors where the bass 
voices were chanting again in unison. "You 
hear what they are singing?" 

"No," I said. 

"Listen, monsieur le Delegue, Primo — 
anno — magni — belli — in the first year of the 
Great War — sub — bono — rege — Alberto — in 
the reign of good King Albert — praefectus 
Mahnius — monasterium — montis Caesarii — 
ab exitio — servavit — laus Deo ! — Officer Mahn 
[67] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

saved from destruction the monastery of 
Mont Cesar." 

"We had fled to M alines, monsieur, we 
monks of Mont Cesar, and two days after 
Louvain had been put to the torch Dom 
Egbert ordered me to return to the monastery 
and care for it. Such lamentations, mon- 
sieur! My brothers and I knew I was going 
to my death, and my blood froze even to 
think of what the Germans might do to me; 
but I went, monsieur, I went guided by God, 
doubtless, through the hordes of refugees 
along the roads, and the Belgian outposts, 
and the Germans, and so at dusk I reached 
the porte de Malines and saw our sacred 
monastery still unharmed by the fires, un- 
touched by the vandals. 

"Louvain flared like a furnace. From 
kilometres away I saw it like a red blot on 
the sky, and the stench of its burning spread 
thoughts so mournful that one entered verit- 
ably as if into the house of death. 

"Monsieur le Delegue, there was no sound 
here at our monastery, so I knocked, and 
[68 1 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

then suddenly some one had me by the throat 
with harsh hands and a voice grunted in 
German, 'So, spy! I have thee?' 

"I was as one dead, monsieur, and fell 
flat on the stone; but that one said. 'Up, 
spy. Ha! Ha! In priest's costume, art 
thou, eh? We shall have sport with thee — a 
spy-priest ! ' For he had felt of my cassock 
in the darkness and he believed, as all the 
Germans believe, that Belgian officers wore 
the garb of priests, that they spied disguised 
as priests, that they even directed rifle-fire 
and artillery-fire gowned as priests — in a word, 
they believed every lie which their generals 
could invent of us. And so my captor 
dragged me through the doorway and down 
the black corridor, where all smelled of naphtha 
as if one were ready to kindle a great fire. 

"He stopped; he beat softly on a door; a 
voice called 'Herein : the door opened, and 
I was flung into the very cell where we sit, 
monsieur. 

"There sat a man at the table where you 
sit, monsieur le Delegue — the man whose 
[69] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

photograph you see — a man young, and hard, 
and cruel, in the costume of a German officer. 
He sat alone before his untasted supper 
dishes. At either end of the table a candle 
dripped and sputtered. The man's elbows 
were propped against the edge of the table, 
and his head hung forward between the can- 
dles, as if he were ill or broken with anxiety. 

"He had been reading, monsieur, and he 
thrust a paper into the breast of his uniform 
as we entered — the sentry and I. His hand 
trembled, and his voice trembled, too, but 
he roared out, 'Speak, one of you.' 

"'A spy, Herr Leutnant,' grunted the 
soldier behind me. ' He was prowling 
round the door.' 

"'So?' 

"'He says he is a monk of this monastery.' 

"'So?' " 

"'He says he ran away before we burned 
"Louvain.' 

"'So?' 

"'He is a damned spy — a damned franc- 
tireur. Else why did he come back?' 
[70] 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

"I was speechless, monsieur. My throat 
ached horribly, for I was half throttled; my 
senses ebbed and flowed like water; I could 
say nothing. 

"'You understand German, spy?' the 
Lieutenant spat at me. 'You understand 
German bullets, nicht? You understand 
LefFe, Latour, Gelrode, Bovenloo?' He 
named over some of the towns where our 
brother-priests had been done to death. 

"I spoke. I said, 'I am Brother Jan, of 
this monastery.' 

"'You are a spy!' 

"'I am no spy! I am Brother Jan of 
Mont Cesar!' 

" His eyes seemed to probe me in the candle- 
light. 'Come here!' he ordered. 

"I advanced a step. 

"'Nearer.' 

"I stood directly opposite. 

'"You see this revolver?' He slipped a 
metal thing from its holster and placed it 
beside his plate. 'I will shoot you if you 
move so much as a millimetre! Now we 

[71] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

shall see who you are.' He stared past me 
at the sentry. 'Fetch the caretaker!' he 
ordered. 

"Then, monsieur, when we were alone 
together, the German became strangely 
quiet. He became as one who is puzzled 
and who wishes to believe something which 
he scarcely dares believe. 'Who are you?' 
he asked, almost gently. 

"'I am a Benedictine — Brother Jan Heyn- 
deryckx.' 

"'You are of this monastery?' 

'"I am of this monastery/ 

"'You know the monastery?' 

'"As I know my hand.' 

"'Why are you here?' 

"'My father-superior ordered me back 
from M alines to stay in the monastery — 
to care for it.' 

"The German leaned forward. He took 
up the revolver and tapped it against the 
nearer candlestick. 'If you lie, you die,' 
he said roughly, yet it seemed to me, mon- 
sieur, as if he wished to believe me, as if he 

[72] 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

desired something of me, as if a new thought 
had risen in his mind, or a new and better 
impulse in his soul, and as if he had resolved 
on a higher course. I have been a parish 
priest, monsieur; I needs must know the hu- 
man heart. 

"The door opened and the sentry entered, 
pushing before him old Piet, the man-of- 
all-work in the monastery cellars — old Piet 
whom we had forgotten and left behind when 
we fled to Malines. He was trembling like 
an aspen leaf and he bent almost to the floor. 

"'Stick him with the bayonet if he doesn't 
stand up,' the Lieutenant roared. 'Do you 
know this person ? ' He pointed at me. 

"Piet did not look up. 

"'Speak out!' thundered the officer. 'Do 
you know him ? ' 

"'I cannot understand.' 

"' Hein ? hein ? You know him?' 

"Piet stole a glance at me. 'Nay,' he 
whispered. 

"The Lieutenant rose from his chair. 
His face became the face of a madman. He 

[73] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

whipped the revolver from the table and 
pointed it wildly. His hand shook, his eyes 
rolled, so that even the sentry was terrified 
and tried to hide behind old Piet and me. 
'Bitte! Bitte!' he ejaculated, ' Bitte, Herr 
Leutnant!' But suddenly my courage came, 
and I spoke swiftly in the familiar Flemish. 

"'Don't you know me, Piet?' I asked. 
' I am Brother Jan. Surely you know me ! ' 

"'You, mynheer Jan, you? Of course, of 
course I know you. I was afraid/ the old 
man babbled. 'I was afraid of him — the 
mad devil in the chair. He is going to burn 
the monastery. He has put naphtha in all 
the rooms. He is going to burn Mont 
Cesar T 

"The Lieutenant smiled like one who is 
pleased, and slid down again into his chair. 
'What does he say?' he asked. 

"'That you are going to burn Mont 
Cesar.' 

"'Good, good! You are an honest man, 
Herr monk. I asked you to see if you 
would lie to me. I understand Flemish. 
[74] 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

Take the old man away/ he ordered, turning 
again to the sentry, 'then come here.' 

"Then, monsieur, there happened the 
strangest thing of all. The door closed. 
We stared into each other's faces, we were 
like gamblers with all at stake, haggard, 
eager, watchful — a priest against a soldier. 

"The German leaned forward. 'Hen- 
monk,' he said in a voice which was like a 
whisper, 'I am not going to burn your mon- 
astery. You see before you the saviour of 
Mont Cesar!' 

"Monsieur, for one breathless moment I 
stood like a stone. I could not believe my 
ears. The man had gone mad, or else I 
was myself mad. 

"'You see before you the saviour of Mont 
Cesar,' he repeated softly. 

"I screamed at him. I thought a thousand 
horrible things in a moment, men pierced 
on stakes, boiled in oil, crucified. I screamed, 
'Kill me! Kill me quickly, but do not 
murder me with words. I will not talk 
with a madman!' 

[75] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"'Herr monk,' he answered, 'I am not 
mad. See!' He thrust his hand into the 
bosom of his uniform and pulled out a crum- 
pled paper, 'See! Here is von Manteuffers 
order; it is dated August 26th. It directs me 
to burn Mont Cesar. The paper shall be 
yours, and the monastery is saved!' 

"'You lie!' I screamed again. 'What is 
this new trick of a scrap of paper?' 

"'It is von ManteufFel's order for me to 
burn Mont Cesar.' 

"'Ha!' I laughed at him. 'A German'is 
ordered to burn a monastery and he dis- 
obeys! That is indeed droll! A German 
who has murdered scores in Belgium, who 
has burned and pillaged and outraged, now 
saves a monastery! Ha, ha! That is likely, 
is it not?' 

'"I have saved Mont Cesar,' he repeated 
steadily. 'Here is the order.' He thrust 
the crumpled paper into my hand. 

"I stared at it. Monsieur, though the 
thing is incredible, it is true. The paper 
was an order from Major von Manteuffel 

[76] 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

directing Ober-Leutnant Mahn to burn Mont 
Cesar! The thing was not a forgery. It is 
incredible, but it is true. I held in my hand 
the thing which could destroy Mont Cesar! 

"'Give it to me,' he said. I "gave it. 
'It shall be yours, if ' 

"'If ' 

"'If you do not forget him who saved 
Mont Cesar.' 

"'Ha!' I laughed at him again. 'You dis- 
obey an order — you who are a lieutenant 
of infantry — but does that save Mont Cesar? 
Yours is a relentless, cruel race. You have 
saved our monastery for a day, maybe: von 
Manteuffel will burn it to-morrow!' 

"This, monsieur, I said because I doubted 
God's providence, because I feared men 
more than God! 

'"Manteuffel will not burn it to-morrow 
or ever, Herr monk,' he replied. 'I have 
learned that Berlin is angry at the scandal 
of Louvain, and has forbidden more burnings. 
Two days have gone by. Your monastery is 
saved. I have saved Mont Cesar.' 

[77] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"A third time the sentry entered, and a 
third time the officer's face grew stern and 
his voice rose angrily: 'Take this monk 
through the monastery; then bring him here. 
Be quick. There is no time to lose,' he said. 
And I followed the sentry out into the black 
corridor. 

"He secured a lantern and I followed him 
down the long halls. In each monastery 
cell, in the refectory, in the kitchen, in the 
library, everything had been piled in a heap, 
soaked in naphtha, and prepared for burning. 
Everything was ready, monsieur, and had 
been ready for two days. This lieutenant 
alone had defeated the machinations of 
that man-devil — that Manteuffel who com- 
manded in Louvain. Why? I do not know, 
except that it was the will of God that Mont 
Cesar should be preserved, and the good God, 
monsieur, uses even the vilest of men to 
work His will. The Good God uses even 
Germans 

" Again T stood in the little cell before the 
saviour of Mont Cesar. 'Herr Offizier,' I 
[78] 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

said, 'Give me the order, and by the good God 
whose instrument you are ' 

"'This is not God's work: it is the devil's !' 
he exclaimed bitterly. 

'"What is the devil's work — that you 
have saved the monastery? No. That is 
of God.' 

" 'God or the devil, I am disgraced.' 

'"By God's will you are saved.' 

"'Saved?' 

"'God will not forget.' 

'"God has forgotten already. I shall 
be shot for this. I have disobeyed orders.' 

"Monsieur, it was the mood of the con- 
fessional, was it not? And this man was 
indeed an instrument of God. Do you 
blame me that I heard his confession, and 
that I gave him comfort — he, an alien, an 
enemy, a Prussian, who had saved Mont 
Cesar and did not know why he had saved 
it, except that God had led him? He knew 
that von Manteuffel had learned of his 
disobedience; he knew that death and dis- 
grace were before him; yet knowing these 

[79] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

things he had persisted, and Mont Cesar 
was saved. 

"Monsieur, God's will is strange, and the 
seed that God plants bears strange fruit. All 
men long for immortality; all men long for 
something which will bear their name to 
posterity, and he who had saved Mont Cesar 
— do you blame him if he longed to be held 
in remembrance by the monks of our mon- 
astery? I promised to place his photograph 
here where you see it. I promised to write 
on it 'The Saviour of Mont Cesar' — as you 
see. I swore by the cross I wear that all 
this should be done, and yet — it was God's 
will, monsieur — the German was not satisfied. 
I could see that his mind was tormented 
still. 

" ' Promise me one thing more, Hen* monk,' 
he begged. 

"'What is it?' I asked. 

"'Promise me just one thing more.' 

'"Very well. I promise, my son,' I said. 
You see, monsieur, I called him 'son,' for he 
was a true son of the Church although a 
[So] 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

Prussian, and he had obeyed the voice of 
the good God although he was my en- 
emy. 

"'Your processions on holy days, you monks 
sing in them ? ' 

" 'We sing, my son/ 

"'Promise me that your monks will re- 
member me.' 

"'I have promised you that.' 

'"Promise me that you will sing in your 
processions — that you will sing of the saving 
of Mont Cesar.' 

"I promised him, monsieur. 

'"Promise that you will sing of me, of 
Lieutenant Mahn, who saved your monastery; 
that you will sing of me for one hundred 
years!' 

'"Herr, I cannot promise that!' I ex- 
claimed. 

"'You have promised. Fulfil what you 
have promised.' 

'"I cannot.' 

"His face became like the face of one 
dead. 'You have promised,' he muttered. 
[81] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

'Sing only that I saved your monastery; 
only that.' 

"Place yourself in that situation, monsieur! 
Was it so great a thing he asked ? God made 
us to long for immortality; was it after all 
so great a thing the German asked of me? 

"Maybe you think he bargained with me, 
maybe to you it seems a high price to pay 
even to him who had saved Mont Cesar — 
the price of a procession once a year for 
one hundred years and a chant of remem- 
brance. But no, monsieur, it was not ex- 
cessive, that price. It was God who de- 
manded it — not he. It was God who willed 
that he should save Mont Cesar, that he 
should disobey, that he should be led out 
in disgrace to die, and that his memory 
should be held accurst by all but his enemies 
— by all save the monks of Mont Cesar. 
Was it, then, so great a thing he asked? I 
had vowed: I must keep my vow. I bent 
my head in prayer, and in an instant I was 
answered. Monsieur, I promised! I would 
grant that strange wish! 
[82I 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

"'Tell me, Herr monk, what will you 
sing?' he begged. 'Tell me in Latin, just 
as you will sing it/ 

"And I, slowly seeking for the words, be- 
gan to speak those which you have heard 
to-night in the halls of Mont Cesar: ' Primo 
anno magni belli, sub bono rege Alberto, 
praefectus Mahnius ' 

"'That means Lieutenant Mann?' he 
asked with eagerness. 

'"Yes. Praefectus Mahnius monasterium 
montis Caesarii ab exitio servavit — laus Deo ! ' 

"'Sing it for me/ he entreated when I 
was done. And I slowly chanted the words. 
'Teach it to me.' 

"Slowly, very slowly I repeated the words 
again and again and again; and ' . . . ab 
exitio servavit, laus Deo ! ' he recited after me. 

"How shall I tell you the end, monsieur? 
There were loud footfalls in the corridor and 
the door resounded to heavy blows ! 

"'They have come for me, Herr monk/ 
the officer whispered. 'Good-bye. I am a 
dead man. Primo anno magni belli — those 
[83] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

are the words? . . . Herein!' he called 
confidently. 

"Then in they came — a non-commissioned 
officer and four privates who filed through 
the doorway, saluted, and stood at atten- 
tion. 'I am named Sergeant Schneider — 
Herr Leutnant Mahn ? ' the leader asked. 

"'Yes,' responded the lieutenant quietly. 

"'My warrant/ said the sergeant, offering 
a paper. 'You are under arrest. Come.' 

"The lieutenant rose slowly from his 
chair. He thrust his pistol into its holster. 
His eyes were bright and very calm. For 
an instant I admired him although he was 
my enemy; he was so calm, so sure. God 
was with him, I know. 'Ab exitio servavit, 
nicht, Herr monk?' he asked. 

"He picked up from the table the written 
order of von Manteuffel. 'Your passport 
and carte d'identite,' he continued slowly, 
as if we had been speaking of them. 'You 
may stay in charge of the monastery with 
Piet. All is in order. . . . Your photo- 
graph, Herr.' He handed me his own photo- 

[8 4 ] 



The Saviour of Mont Cesar 

graph — the photograph you see on the wall, 
monsieur/ Your Ausweiss!' He gave me 
the written order from von Manteuffel di- 
recting that the monastery be burned. Then 
he turned quietly to the file of soldiers and 
walked out before them. . . . 

"It is not the face of a bad man, that face 
in the photograph, monsieur," said Brother 
Jan, as I stared again into the steady, narrow 
eyes of the picture of Lieutenant Mahn. 
"God asks no questions of men when He 
would use them. Our monastery is saved 
through the hand of a stranger and an enemy. 
It is the work of God, laus Deo ! Let us praise 
God, monsieur." 



[85] 



VI 

GHOSTS 

BELGIAN peasants say that on the 
Eve of All Souls unquiet spirits are 
loosed from their graves for an hour 
after sunset. Those who died by violence, 
or those who died unshriven, rise from the 
dark and speak to passersby; they rise with 
the load of their sins upon them, with the 
hatred, or fear, or agony, or longing which 
they felt while dying, still in their tortured 
hearts, and they beg the passersby to take 
vengeance on their enemies, or to give them 
news of those they loved or hated. And 
after a brief hour they sink back again into 
the dust. 

I believe the story, for I have met those 
sad spirits. It was on a foggy evening in 
October — All Souls' Eve — on the road from 
[861 



Ghosts 

Brussels to Antwerp, where Belgians and 
Britons a year before faced the German 
hordes in weeks of bitter fighting. We were 
in a terrible hurry. Pierre, the chauffeur, 
was driving the motor-car; I was seated be- 
side him. The headlights blurred like drowned 
eyes, and the open windshield dripped with 
wet. If we met a belated cart, or if we mis- 
judged distances on that winding road, we 
would never reach our destination alive! 
But we Were in a hurry, for it was All Souls' 
Eve — the night of the dead. 

Drowned trees writhed in the blurred 
light, culverts leaped out of the yellow flood 
like fountains, and dead walls in the burned 
and ravished villages seemed like rows of 
Roman tombs. We flew through the mur- 
dered town of Eppeghem, down vacant 
alleys lined with gaunt, disembowelled dwell- 
ings, beneath the shell of a church, beside 
stark walls lit for a breathless instant by 
the headlight of the motor then blotted 
into chaos. It was eerie and terrifying. A 
peculiar odour of decay, the odour of sour 
[87] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

soil in early spring when the grip of the ice 
is relaxed and the buried abominations of 
winter steal up into the sun, rose from the 
town and pursued us — a smell like rotten 
fungi in old crypts. Sounds like the flap- 
ping of garments on a clothesline stole 
through the steady bass roar of the motor, 
and to my heavy eyes, tortured with staring 
into the yellow blur ahead, a vague shape 
seemed to float beside the car, a shape 
which was strangely human; erect, but rigid, 
flying along like a dry leaf upright in a 
gale. 

I could see it only with the tail of my eye. 
It disappeared when I turned my head. It 
was clearest when I rolled my eyes high and 
looked through the lower part of the retina 
— a sort of second-sight, I suppose. The 
thing puzzled, angered, then frightened me. 
"Faster! Vite ! Vite /" I yelled, suddenly 
grasping Pierre by the arm. The shadowy 
thing danced into the edges of the blur of 
light directly ahead. "Look out, Pierre V 
The emergency brake came on with a grind 



Ghosts 

and jolt, and the lights flared with the pulse 
of the engine. "It's nothing," I protested, 
half ashamed of myself, for evidently Pierre 
saw nothing. "Encore plus vite" 

We seemed to have lost the shadow-thing, 
until suddenly I discovered that there were 
others with it, swinging rigid through the 
fog like trees uprooted in a cyclone. My 
eyes were smarting with cold tears: it was 
like swimming with one's eyes open in a 
stiff current. And all the time I watched 
the shadow-shapes gathering closer. Faintly 
luminous pale yellow blots seemed to grow 
in the dingy black of the racing forms. They 
were phosphorescent, as I think of them now. 
Something brushed my hair. A clicking 
sound like castanets came from the empty 
tonneau behind me, and then a whist- 
ling, like the speech of a man with no 
palate. 

(( Sssss — Feld — Feld — Feldwebelwar ich, aus 
Bay em — seeks — sechsundzwanzigsten — infan- 
terie Regiment." 

I turned my head with an involuntary 
[89] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

sob. There was absolutely nothing in the 
car. Pierre put on brakes violently. 

"Do you see anything ?" I demanded. 

"Nothing, monsieur.'' 

"Do you hear or smell anything?" 

We listened and sniffed. "Nothing, mon- 
sieur," Pierre said, quivering and crossing 
himself. The noise of the motor died, and 
we sat motionless in gruesome darkness 
listening to the hollow dripping of fog- 
water on the fallen leaves in the roadway. 
We were swallowed, lost in mist, with only 
a square yard of paved road visible before 
us. "Go on, Pierre," I said softly. 

Then gradually I saw the ghosts more 
plainly. A woman, bent like an old hinge, 
flung along beside the flying motor-car, and a 
naked, frightened child ran fearfully before 
her. "Ask him, Grutje, ask him about 
home ! "a thin child-voice sobbed. A younger 
woman whose head had been hacked from 
her shoulders floated along with them, fond- 
ling the severed member and wailing, "De 
Deutschers — the Germans!" A group of 
[90] 



Ghosts 

mangled bodies of Belgian artillerymen hung 
like a swarm of bees together, mouthing 
curses as they flew, and a gigantic peasant, 
with clotted beard and arms stretched rigid 
in the form of a cross, stared with a face 
stabbed through and through like honey-comb. 

" Feldwebel Stoner. Konig, Kaiser, Valer- 
iana 1 , sie leben hoch !" whispered a voice. 

The swarming spirits grew till they dark- 
ened the mist. We flew through the 
empty corridors of Malines, and on to 
Waelhem — first of the Antwerp forts to fall 
— up the ridge to Waerloos and Contich, 
toward Oude God and the inner forts. Still 
the swarms grew, crowding closer and closer. 
The eyes of the dead peered like cats' eyes 
in the yellow dark, and my soul chilled to 
ice. The odour of dead clay was so strong 
I nearly fainted, and bony fingers seemed 
to press against my back and shoulders as if 
heavy wires were freezing into the flesh. 
"Light the dash-light, for God's sake, Pierre !" 
I cried, hoping the new electric blur would 
banish the phantoms, but their sulphurous 

[91] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

eyes glowed only the more in its feeble 
ray. 

And the hissing, clicking, and rattling 
grew. " Feldwebel Stoner, aus Bay em, tot, 
Eppeghem, September dreizehn . . . Konig, 
Kaiser, und Vaterland — hoch / " a voice shrilled ; 
" De Deutschers ! de Deutschers ! "sobbed an 
echo after it. And then, with a sudden 
access of horror, I remembered the saying 
of the peasants; I knew what had wakened 
those unquiet spirits; knew that they wished 
to question me; knew that I must answer 
their questions in the brief hour of their re- 
lease; all of them I must answer! 

"... leben hoch /" screamed the 
German voice. "Are we in Paris ?" 

"No!" I shouted. 

... suis Franc ais. Vive la France I 
. . . Have we reached the Rhine?" 

"No!" 

"... Beige. Is Belgium free?" 

"No!" 

"... honour, the honour of my 
country, honour — honour?" 
[92] 



Ghosts 

"No!" 

" . . Sozialdemokrat — for world- 

peace I fought, that the world might have 
peace. Is there peace ?" 

"No!" 

"... cure of Weerloo, dead for my 
church and my flock. Are we victorious?" 

"No!" 

"Ask, Grutje, ask!" trilled a child's voice, 
and a sad shriek answered it: "Home — the 
little farm on the road to Elewyt beside 
Kasteel Weerde — is it safe?" 

I knew that farm, a blackened ruin like the 
castle beside it, with two lath crosses lean- 
ing crazily over sunken graves in the door- 
yard. "No!" 

"No, no, no!" The horrid refrain beat 
them back. By ones and tens and hundreds 
they asked and were denied. They had 
died as most men live, hoping to-morrow 
would bring bliss which yesterday with- 
held. They had died, as most men 
live, for dreams. In all the world there 
was no consolation for them, no word 

[93] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

of honest hope or recompense. In all the 
world there was nothing for them but a 
shallow grave and a little wooden cross. 

"I came from Devon to Antwerp, sir, 
with the Marines. Have we whipped the 
Huns?" 

"No!" 

A woman's passionate voice screamed out: 
"They murdered my child, they murdered 
my man, they murdered me. Vengeance! 
Vengeance! Vengeance!" 

"No! ... No! ... No! . . ." 
And I fell forward in the car senseless. 

When I awoke the fog had almost disap- 
peared, Pierre was chafing my cold hands, 
and the shadow-shapes had gone. They had 
sunken again into their hollow graves, un- 
satisfied, unconsoled. We rode swiftly on 
toward Antwerp. A clean breeze stole up 
from the west, purifying the stricken fields 
and their sad memories. It tore the last 
remnants of gray veil from the sky. And 
as we turned into the black, silent city 

[94] 



Ghosts 

streets, I leaned my head far back and 
stared up into the night with a sudden sense 
of relief and even of comfort. The sick 
little planet Earth fell away from me, far, 
far, infinitely far, and about me was un- 
vexed emptiness and the tremendous stars. 



[95] 



VII 

THE DESERTER 

IT WAS five o'clock in the morning. A 
riotous sunrise deluged the Campine as I 
slipped into my clothes and ran down 
the narrow, twisting tower-stair to keep a 
secret tryst with the Baas, or overseer. 
Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediaeval 
archers, let in the arrows of the sun; and as I 
ran through the gloomy armoury and the high- 
roofed Flemish dining hall — stripped of their 
treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbows, and 
blunderbusses by the diligent Germans — out 
to the causeway, and over the creaking draw- 
bridge on my way to the stables and the dis- 
mantled brewery, I imagined myself an 
escaped prisoner from the donjons of Cha- 
teau Drie Toren. In truth, I was running 
away from Baron van S teen's week-end 
[96] 



The Deserter 

house-party for a breath of rustic air while 
the others slept. 

The stables, tool sheds, hostlers' barracks, 
bake-oven, and brewery were thatch roofed 
and walled with brick, toned to a claret- 
red, pierced with small windows and heavy 
oaken doors. The doors were banded with 
the baronial colours — blue stripes alternating 
with yellow, like stripes on a barber pole 
— and in the centre of the hollow square of 
farm buildings fumed a mammoth brown 
manure pile. A smell of fresh-cut hay and 
the warm smell of animals clung about the 
stables, and I heard the watch-dog rattle his 
chain and sniff at the door as I passed. 

I found the Baas standing before his door, 
his face wrinkled with pleasure, his cap in 
his hand. Behind him his wife peered out 
at us, wiping her fat hands on her skirts, 
and two half-grown children stared from the 
nearest window. The Baas and his wife 
were the parents of sixteen children! 

"Good day, mynheer!" every one shouted 
in chorus. 

[97] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Good day, madame; good day, Baas." 
(I used the Flemish title for overseer — the 
word from which has come our much-abused 
word "Boss.") "I'm a deserter this morn- 
ing: the rest of the Baron's party sleeps." 

"Ah, so," laughed the wife. "Mynheer 
is like the German soldiers who desert by 
dozens nowadays. And would your Honour 
hide in the forest like them — like the Ger- 
mans?" 

"To be sure. The Baas is to show me the 
deepest coverts, where mynheer the Baron 
will never find me more." 

We laughed and passed on. A girl with a 
neckyoke and full milk pails came by from 
the dairy; nodding faces appeared at the 
windows of the farm buildings as we walked 
toward the woods; bees sped up the air from 
conical straw hives close to our path; and in 
a few minutes we were threading our way 
through a nursery of young pines, tilled 
like corn rows in Kansas, and all of equal 
age. 

"Monsieur, there is a soul in trees," said 
[98] 



The Deserter 

the Baas, affectionately patting an ancient 
linden on the border of the old forest. The 
Baas was a man from the Province of Liege, 
and he preferred to speak French with me 
rather than Flemish. He had, too, a Walloon 
lightness of wit which went sometimes in- 
congruously with his heavy frame, as when 
he said to me once when we were debating 
the joys of youth versus age, "To be old has 
its advantages, monsieur. One can then be 
virtuous, and it is not hard!" 

"There is a soul in trees," he repeated. 
"All together the trees have a soul. A forest 
is one spirit. These trees are old men and 
old women, very patient and kindly and 
sluggish of blood. They nod their heads in 
the wind like peasants over a stove. And 
they talk. Sometimes I think that I can 
understand their talk — very wise and patient 
and slow. Men hurry apart, monsieur, but 
the trees remain together like old married 
people and watch their children grow up 
around them. 

"Here" — we had turned down a path 
[99 1 



Tales From a Famished Land 

and were in the fringes of another forest of 
small pines — -"here the Germans have taken 
trees for their fortifications, slashed and 
cut, and those trees that are left are like 
wounded soldiers: they have arms too long 
or too short, heads smashed, feet uprooted, 
and yet they wish to live, because they are 
one spirit." 

"What is this?" I demanded abruptly, for 
at my feet yawned a little pit, with lumpy 
clay still fresh about it and a fallen cross 
lying half hidden in the weeds. 

"Ho, that? It is the grave of a German," 
said the Baas heartily. He spat into the 
raw pit. "The German has been taken 
away, but the children of Drie Toren are 
still afraid. They will not come by this 
path on account of the dead Deutscher." 

His foot crushed the rude cross as he 
talked, and we walked on. But I was vaguely 
troubled. That vile pit and the thought of 
what it had contained had spoiled my 
promenade. As I had found on a thousand 
other occasions, my freedom in Belgium was 
[ ioo] 



The Deserter 

only a fiction. The war could not be for- 
gotten, even for an hour. 

A partridge thundered up at our feet and 
rocketed to earth again beyond the protecting 
pines. In a little glade we surprised four 
young rabbits together at breakfast. The 
Baas laid his hand lightly on my arm. "It 
is sad, monsieur, isn't it?" he said. "The 
poachers steal right and left nowadays. The 
gardes champetres are no longer armed, so the 
thieves do as they will. There is more 
pheasant in the city markets than chicken, 
and more rabbit than veal. The game will 
soon be gone, like our horses and cattle. 

"You remember, monsieur, the sand dunes 
by Blankenberghe and Knocke on the Bel- 
gian coast ? Ah, the rabbits that used to be 
in those dunes ! But now the firing of cannon 
has driven them all away." 

A silence fell upon us both. The thickets 
grew denser, and we pushed our way slowly 
toward the deeper coverts. I found myself 
thinking of the little crosses along the sea- 
side dunes which marked where greater game 
[101] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

than rabbits had fallen — the graves of men 
— the biggest game on earth — the shallow 
pits and the frail wooden crosses, like that 
which the Baas's leather boot had crushed 
a half hour before. 

We had reached the deepest woods when 
a gasping, choking cry stopped us short. 
The thicket directly before us stirred and 
then lay still as death. The cry had been 
horrible as a Banshee's wail, and as myste- 
rious, but it was not the cry of an animal; 
it was human, and it came from a human 
being in agony. The Baas crossed him- 
self swiftly and leaped forward, and instantly 
we had parted the protecting bushes and 
were looking down on a man lying flat on 
the ground — a spectre with a thin white 
face, chattering teeth, enormous frightened 
eyes, and a filthy, much-worn German uni- 
form. 

"What are you doing here?" I demanded. 

The soldier did not answer, he did not rise, 
he lay motionless and hideous, like a beast. 
Then I caught sight of his left ankle, enor- 
[ 102] 



The Deserter 

mously swollen and wrapped in rags, and his 
hands — they were thin as sticks. The man 
was helpless, and he was starving. 

And now came a strange thing. We two 
walked slowly around the man on the ground, 
as if he were a wild creature caught in a 
snare. We felt no pity or astonishment; 
only curiosity. Utterly unemotionally we 
took note of him and his surroundings. 
He had no gun, no knife, and no blankets. 
He lay on some broken boughs, and he 
seemed to have covered himself with boughs 
at night. The wild, haggard eyes turned 
in their sockets and watched us as we moved, 
but otherwise no part of the man stirred. 
He seemed transfixed, frozen in an agony of 
fear and horror. 

"Ashes! He has had a fire here, monsieur, 
but it was days ago." At the man's feet the 
Baas had discovered the remnants of a little 
fire. "Holy blue!" he added in astonish- 
ment, "he has eaten these!" 

A pile of small green twigs lay near the 
fire. The bark had been chewed from them! 
[103] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

At the end of our search we turned again 
to the man on the ground. "Who are you? 
What are you doing here ? " I demanded again. 
There was no answer. "Baas, have you a 
flask?" 

The old man slowly drew a little leather- 
clad bottle from his breast pocket and passed 
it to me in silence. He offered it with obvious 
reluctance, and watched jealously as I knelt 
and dropped a little stream of liquid between 
the parted lips of the creature on the ground. 
The man's lips sucked inward, his throat 
choked at the raw liquor, he opened his mouth 
wide and gasped horribly for breath, his 
knees twitched, and his wrists trembled as 
if he were dying. Then the parched mouth 
tried to form words; it could only grimace. 

For a moment I felt a mad impulse to leap 
on that moving mouth and crush it into still- 
ness; such an impulse as makes a hunter 
wring the neck of a wounded bird. In- 
stead, I continued dropping the stinging 
liquor and listening. 

Then came the first word. "More!" the 
[ 104] 



The Deserter 

black lips begged, and I emptied the flask into 
them. The Baas sighed plaintively. " Ger- 
man ?" the soldier whispered. 

"No. American," I answered. 

"The otherone?" 

"Belgian." 

The frightened eyes closed in evident re- 
lief. The man seemed to sleep. 

"But you?" I asked. 

"I'm German — a soldier," he said. 

"Lost?" 

"Missing." He used the German word 
vermisst — the word employed in the official 
lists of losses to designate the wounded or 
dead who are not recovered, and those lost 
by capture or desertion. 

"You understand, Baas?" 

"No, monsieur." 

"He says he is a German soldier — a de- 
serter, I suppose, trying to make his way 
over the frontier to Holland. And he is 
starving." 

The Baas's face became a battleground 
of emotions. His kindly eyes glared merrily, 
[105] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

his lips twisted until his beard seemed to 
spread to twice its natural width. Instantly 
his face became grave again, then puzzled, 
even anxious. A stream of invective and 
imprecation in mingled French and Flemish 
poured from his troubled lips, and he stamped 
his feet vigorously. 

"He can't stay here," I concluded. 

"It is death to help him, ,, said the Baas. 

"For you, yes; for me, no. The Germans 
can only disgrace me as a member of 
the Relief Commission. They cannot kill 



me. 
ft 



He must not be left to die here, mon- 



sieur." 



"The Germans will probably search your 
house if we take him there." 

"He may betray us if we help him." 

"That is possible. But you see he is 
very weak — almost dead." 

"He may be a spy." 

"That again is possible. But see! He 
has eaten twigs!" 

"He is a damned pig of a German!" 
f 106 1 



The Deserter 

"But you do not feed even pigs on sticks 
and leaves." 

"I am afraid, monsieur." 

"So am I, Baas. Yet you must decide, 
and not I. It is much more dangerous for 
you than for me." 

We stared into each other's eyes, trying to 
guess each other's thoughts. Every one in 
Belgium knows that the German army sows 
its informers everywhere. We could not 
even trust each other in that stricken coun- 
try. Deserters and traitors were tracked 
like dogs. Any one who gave aid or com- 
fort to such persons did so at the risk of 
his life. It is said that pretended deserters 
deliberately trapped Belgians into aiding 
them, and then betrayed their hosts. Some- 
thing of the sort was hinted in the famous 
case of Miss Edith Cavell. Knowledge, 
then, bade us be cautious; instinct alone bade 
us be kind. 

The Baas's wide eyes turned again to the 
creature on the ground, and he sighed plain- 
tively. "Monsieur," he began, in a very 
[ 107] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

low, gentle voice, "I will help him. Give 
me my flask and I will go for food and drink. 
Then we must plan. Does it please you to 
remain here?" 

"I shall stay here with him." 

"Good! I will go." 

I knelt beside the soldier and chafed his 
filthy hands until blood flowed again in his 
dry veins. The swollen pupils of his 
eyes brightened. He talked continuously in 
a thin trickling whisper — a patter of in- 
formation about dinners he had eaten, wines 
he had drunk, his military service, his hard- 
ships, and his physical and mental sensa- 
tions. I had read of victims of scurvy in 
the Arctic snows dreaming and talking day 
and night of food, only of food. So it was 
with the starving soldier. The liquor had 
made him slightly delirious, and he babbled 
on and on. 

His broken ankle pained him. When I 

moved him about to rest it, his lightness 

astonished me. The man had been large 

and heavy; he was shrunken to a bag of 

[108] 



The Deserter 

bones. His uniform hung about him like a 
sack, and it seemed as if the slightest jar 
would snap his arms and legs. Tears welled 
under his heavy, dirty eyelids. "Mother! 
Mother !" he whispered once. "Art thou 
there? Mother !" Then, as his eyes again 
cleared and he saw the trees interarched above 
him — the trees which the Baas had told 
me were one spirit; the grim, silent, sepulchral 
trees; the haunted, malignant trees which 
had wooed him with their shelter and then 
broken him and starved him; the trees be- 
neath which his forest-dwelling ancestors 
had cowered for thousands of years and to 
which they had offered human sacrifices — 
he broke down and sobbed horribly. "She 
is not here! She is not here! No, she is 
not here!" he repeated over and over again. 

When the Baas returned, we covered the 
deserter with our coats and fed him. Per- 
haps we did wrong to give him food, although 
I think now that he was doomed before we 
found him. We did our best, but it was not 
[109] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

enough. In less than an hour, after a hor- 
rible spell of vomiting, the poor man was 
beyond all help of ours. His eyes rolled 
desperately, his breath came in horrid gasps, 
and he grew rigid like a man in an epileptic 
fit. 

We tore open the breast of his uniform to 
ease his laboured breathing. A metal iden- 
tification disk hung on a cord from about his 
neck over a chest which was like a wicker- 
work of ribs. His belly was sunken until 
one almost saw the spinal column through 
it. His tortured lungs subsided little by 
little, the terrifying sound of his breathing 
sank to nothing, his head thrust far back 
and over to the right side, his arms stiffened 
slowly, his mouth fell open. 

We watched, as if fascinated, the pulsing 
vein in his emaciated neck, still pumping 
blood through a body which had ceased to 
breathe. The top of the blood column at 
last appeared, like mercury in a thermometer. 
It fell half an inch with each stroke of the 
famished heart. It reached the base of the 
[no] 



The Deserter 

neck and sank from sight, and still we stared 
and stared. The man was dead, yet I seemed 
to have an awful vision of billions of sentient 
cells, billions of little selfish lives which had 
made up his life, fighting, choking, starving 
to death within that cooling clay. 

The Baas bent his head, uncovered, and 
crossed himself. With a quick stooping 
motion he closed the wide-open eyes and 
straightened the bent limbs. Then he rose 
to his full height and looked at me sadly. 
"This man had a mother, monsieur," he 
said. "We must forget the rest." 

In the pit where the other German had 
lain we buried the body of the deserter, and 
we found and repaired the little lath cross 
and set it up at the grave's head. But first 
I took from about the neck of the corpse the 
oval medallion which told the man's name and 
regimental number. It was a silver medal, 
finer than those usually worn by privates in 
the German army. I have it by me as I 
write, and on it is etched the brave sentence, 

[mi 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"God shield you from all dangers of warfare, 
and render you back to us safe and victor- 
ious !" 

I was late for breakfast at the Chateau, 
but Van Steen kindly made room for me at 
his right hand. "Aha, monsieur," he called 
gaily, "we thought you were helping to find 
the deserter." 

"Wha-what, monsieur le Baron?" I stut- 
tered in amazement. 

"The German deserter. A file of soldiers 
woke us up at seven o'clock, inquiring for 
one of their men who ran away from Mons a 
month ago. They are searching the stables 
and the forest. They have traced him here 
to our commune. I hope they catch him!" 

My fingers clutched the silver disk in my 
pocket. "I think they will not catch him, 
messieurs. He ran away a month ago, you 
say?" 

"A month ago. . . . But it is noth- 
ing to us, eh? Let us eat our breakfasts." 
The Baron bowed grandly to me. "Mon- 
sieur le Delegue," he began in his smooth, 

[112] 



The Deserter 

formal voice, "once again we remind our- 
selves that it is thanks to you and the gener- 
ous American people that we have bread. 
It is thanks to you that our noble Belgium 
is not starving. . . . Eh bien! Let us 
eat our breakfasts." 
And so we did. 



[ii3l 



VIII 

THE GLORY OF TINARLOO 

A SECOND time we seated ourselves 
at our little round table in the 
restaurant on the boulevard Anspach 
— the director of the art museum and I. 
A mug of light Belgian beer was before each 
of us, and a copy of La Belgique telling of the 
Somme battles. The director's hands shook 
as he reached for the newspaper and his 
half-finished beer. His breath came in short, 
apoplectic gasps. He was wildly angry. A 
couple of minutes before a Flemish newsboy 
had rushed into the restaurant and shouted, 
"Aeroplane! The Germans are shooting 
it!" And the restaurant had emptied like 
a hive, filling the boulevard, where every 
one gazed at the dull gray dragonfly droning 
at an immense height over the city, pursued 

f."4] 



The Glory of Tinarloo 

with soft white smoke-flowers which thudded 
as they bloomed in the upper air. While we 
watched, an old peasant in wooden shoes 
and padded black petticoats dropped her 
market basket on the director's toes. He 
forgot aeroplane and anti-aircraft guns, war, 
the crowds, and me, his guest. He howled, 
he cursed, he danced; and now that we were 
safe again at our table in the restaurant, 
anathema and malediction still tumbled 
from his full red lips. 

"Ces sales paysants, Us sont des brutes ! 
Imbeciles ! Idiots ! Cochons !" he stuttered, 
his feet prancing under the table. "They 
are beasts truly, monsieur: not men, but 
beasts, these peasants. What a temper 
I am in. But these beasts of peasants. 
Ah! . . ." he smiled suddenly and went 
on, "I will tell you a story of them. 

"You have heard, monsieur, of Van de 
Werve, the artist ? He was of the school of 
Rubens; he died in Italy, very young. He 
had only twenty-three years when he died. 
He was not rich; he was very poor. But 

[115] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

he had the spirit, the genius, the flair, and 
Rubens loved him. The Master said one 
day, 'You must go to Italy to study. Here 
is a purse of gold. Here are letters of intro- 
duction to my friends. Here is a horse. Go to 
Italy.' And the young man started. Months 
went by and no word of him came to Rubens 
or the other friends he had in Antwerp. 
He did not arrive in Italy. The purse of 
gold, the letters of introduction, the horse, 
the pupil of Rubens — all were completely 
lost to sight. After a year some friends 
set out to search for him, and behold! in 
the village of Tinarloo in Brabant they found 
him, painting an altar piece for the chapel of 
that place, and kissing and clipping the 
daughter of the burgomaster, who sat on 
his knee! He was always gallant, was 
Van de Werve, and as he rode into Tinarloo 
on his way to Italy, he had seen and fallen 
in love with the burgomaster's daughter and 
sat at her feet for a year. 

"But the altar piece, monsieur! You 
have never seen it? Ah, that was magni- 
[116] 



The Glory of Tinarloo 

ficent — 'The Virgin of the Stair' — gold, green, 
ravishing! What atmosphere! What feel- 
ing! What soul! 

"I saw it only once before the war. I 
tried to buy it for the museum, but those 
dirty peasants of Tinarloo would not give 
it up. Ugh — a village of fat farmers smell- 
ing of dungheaps and cattle pens and garlic! 
Their chapel was bastard Gothic — no fit place 
for such an altar piece. I urged the cure to 
sell, but he would not. He was ignorant as 
his peasants, but he was crafty, too. He said 
the picture was the glory of Tinarloo, the 
chief joy of the peasants. I offered him 
twice as much as I first intended, thinking 
he meant to bargain with me; three times, 
four times as much. He refused two thou- 
sand francs, monsieur! 

"Afterward came the war. I am a brave 
man, monsieur. I am not afraid of the Ger- 
mans. When they advanced near to Tinar- 
loo I thought of the ' Virgin of the Stair.' 
'It must be saved,' I said to myself. 'Those 
peasants, that cure will be glad to give it 

[117] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

up now.' I hurried there in a cart. East- 
ward, near Namur, the great guns roared. 
There stood sentries along the roads. Peas- 
ants were running away before the Germans 
with farmcarts piled with goods. They 
blocked the road, and I had even to beat 
them out of my way with my whip. 

" So I reached Tinarloo. Every one was 
terrified. I went to the chapel. The cure 
was there, and the burgomaster, a toothless 
old man with a dirty beard. 'Give me the 
picture, quick,' I exclaimed. 'I will save it 
from the Germans. Quick!' 'No, mon- 
sieur,' said the cure. 'The picture will stay 
here. It is the glory of Tinarloo; it is the 
chief joy of our peasants.' 

"There came a scream and a roar from the 
street, monsieur, like the sound of a great 
storm, and I knew the Germans were shell- 
ing the village. The old burgomaster bel- 
lowed something. I do not understand 
Flemish, but I knew he said something of 
the church and the picture; maybe it was 
that the Germans always destroy churches 
[118I 



The Glory of Tinarloo 

and pictures. He hobbled out 'The pic- 
ture, the picture, give me the picture!' I 
roared at the cure. 'Give it to me or I will 
take it. Fool! the Germans will take it if 
I do not. Give it to me. Quick!' 'It is 
the glory of Tinarloo; the chief joy of our 
peasants. I will not give it.' 'Then I will 
take it,' I shouted, for I was stronger than 
he, monsieur. He clutched me, but I threw 
him off and grasped the picture by the cor- 
ner. There came another roar, terrible, and 
a part of the church tower fell through the 
roof. The cure screamed and dropped to 
his knees, praying. I worked to get the 
picture from the frame. 

"Suddenly, monsieur, I was grasped and 
thrown down. Those brutes of peasants 
had come into the church; twelve, fifteen of 
them, following the burgomaster with the 
dirty beard. They held me fast with their 
stinking hands. One of them tried to 
strangle me, and my neck bears the marks 
to this day. Bang — a shell fell in the church- 
yard and bits of shrapnel ripped the win- 

[119] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

dows. The church was choked with dust 
and roared with noise. The cure stood up 
before the picture. He yelled to the animals 
who held me down. They loosed me, and I 
stood upright, gasping. One of them had a 
great club in his hand, another a dung-fork, 
another a flail. They gathered close to 
the cure, close to the picture, and talked; the 
fools talked while shells flew, knowing the 
Germans always aim at churches; yet they 
talked. 

"Then the cure came down to me where I 
was standing. 'They say to give you the 
picture, monsieur,' he said. 'But you must 
swear by this cross to bring it back when all 
is safe. It is the glory of Tinarloo; it is 
the chief joy ' 

"Monsieur, there was a scream like devils 
in torment and a shock like earthquake. I 
was knocked from my feet. Bricks, timbers 
fell. Dust covered me, and I lost conscious- 
ness. Long afterward I found myself lying 
in the grass of the churchyard, among the 
black crosses, and the cure kneeling over 
[120] 



The Glory of Tinarloo 

me; only the cure! 'Go/ he said. His 
mouth was bleeding from a deep cut and 
his gown was slashed to ribbon. 'Go, go/ 
he said. I heard him as if in a dream. 'Go! 
There is no longer any picture. Go! before 
the Germans come/ 

"So I came away, monsieur. . . . 
They are strange beasts, these Belgian 
peasants." 



[121] 



IX 



A FLEMISH FANCY 

THE instant Father Guido died his 
naked soul leaped from his body 
and ran up the air as on a stair." 
Odile stopped her story. "Hoo-oo," she 
sighed reproachfully, crossing her gaunt old 
hands over her middle and staring at my 
sleepy head. "Mynheer is not listening!" 

Odile always came into my bedroom before 
I was up in the morning. It was her func- 
tion to waken me, and then to gossip with 
me while she opened the green Venetian 
blinds, tightly closed the windows against 
the noxious air of morning, laid out linen, 
and prepared my bath in an adjoining room. 
Her thin, motherly face was the first thing 
I saw when I wakened; always smiling, no 
matter if things had gone well or ill, always 
[ 122] 



A Flemish Fancy 

ready to tell me a story if that were needed 
to put me in a good humour. "All well, 
Odile?" " Ja y mynheer, except that the 
Germans half killed a policeman in front of 
the house last night. He screamed horribly, 
mynheer." Such was a typical morning's 
news. 

She petted me outrageously, and, although 
she never summoned courage to assert it to 
my face, among the servants below-stairs 
she gave herself airs and boldly called me 
her b'eb'e. I confided to her my love affairs 
in return for which small flatteries she em- 
broidered my handkerchiefs, criticised my 
unstarched American shirts, doped me faith- 
fully whenever I fell ill, and protested elo- 
quently against the perils of too frequent 
bathing. Daily baths might be healthy in 
America; they were certainly unhealthy in 
Belgium, said Odile. 

The tale of what happened to Father 

Guido comes back to me in fragments. 

Perhaps Odile did not tell it to me at all. 

Perhaps she told it when I was too sleepy 

[ 123] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

to remember. In any event, I cannot now 
tell how much is hers and how much my 
own. The words, alas! are mine, in any 
case. 

"Nay, Odile, I am listening. Tell me 
about Father Guido." 

"He was a holy priest, a canon in his mon- 
astery, but he doubted God's promise of the 
bliss of heaven !" 

"Dreadful!" 

"Yes, wasn't it, mynheer ? So he died, and 
his soul ran up the air as on a stair. And 
now listen! The soul of Father Guido 
stopped for breath and wheezed hard. It 
was not used to running. It stood stark 
naked in the sunlight just three meters above 
the bell-tower of the monastery where he had 
lived and served God twenty-seven years. 
The garden looked very sheltered and in- 
viting. You must know that Father Guido 
loved gardening, mynheer. The soul could 
see his favourite mulberry tree, and acolytes 
in gray gowns walking beneath, meditating. 
One of the acolytes lifted a hand and stole a 
[ 124] 



A Flemish Fancy 

berry. 'Rogue!' the soul thought. It was 
about to walk down into the garden and 
remonstrate with the thief when suddenly 
it leaped into the air as if a wasp had stung 
it. The heavy monastery bell just below 
it clanged like an explosion. Bang ! went 
the bell; then again, bang ! and after a pause, 
again, bang! 'Some one is dead,' thought 
the soul. It licked its lips thoughtfully. 
They tasted damp and oily. And suddenly 
it remembered — that was the oil of extreme 
unction. 'I am dead/ said the soul of Father 
Guido with resignation, 'and on my way 
to bliss — I hope.' 

"The soul began to climb up long vistas 
of air, but abruptly it stopped. 'My God, 
I'm stark naked!' it thought; 'stark naked, 
and the eye of all the world is on me.' Not 
once since Father Guido donned his habit had 
he been unclothed in public. But the waste 
of air about the poor soul offered no shelter, 
and there was no returning the way it had 
come. Its chest heaved with sorrow and its 
eyes peered everywhere, above, below, beside 

[»sl 



Tales From a Famished Land 

it; but nothing — not even a summer cloud — 
came near to give it shelter* 'I'm thin and 
withered and IVe a belly like a tun,' the soul 
said bitterly, and it slapped its thin shanks 
as it ran, and breathed hard. 

"A hawk circled in space, and the soul 
turned and climbed in the direction of the 
swinging bird. It got within two meters of 
the hawk and hailed him in Flemish — for all 
the birds understand Flemish, mynheer — - 
but the hawk sailed by unheeding, its eye 
on the distant earth. Father Guido's soul 
was disappointed. 'But if I can't be heard 
or seen, it doesn't much matter about my 
clothes,' it said, and climbed on slowly. 

"The high air grew very cold, but the ex- 
ertions of the soul kept it in a healthy per- 
spiration. It gathered strength and agility 
as it climbed; it seemed to leap from hilltop to 
hilltop of the atmosphere, and below it earth 
fell away like a ball dropped into a well. A 
shadow came crawling from the east, de- 
vouring the earth as Father Guido's soul 
watched and climbed; the shadow floated 
[126] 



A Flemish Fancy 

like pitch over all the world, silently, swiftly- 
eating everything. It reached the centre 
of the world. It devoured the monastery 
and went on, gathering all things into its 
mouth. Long afterward the sun dropped 
out of sight, and darkness leaped upon the 
soul high in air and cloaked it in freezing 
night. 

"The soul was dreadfully alone now, alone 
with millions of winking stars, but it climbed 
on and on and on. 

"Mynheer, no man has ever told how lonely 
the dead are; how they cry out in the dark- 
ness and stretch out their arms; where yes- 
terday there was warmth and light and 
friendly hands and soft laughter there is only 
cold, emptiness, nothing. Oh, how lonely 
the dead are! How lonely the dead are! 

"Men do not know how many months or 
years or centuries the soul climbed up through 
theswarmingstars,butatlastitcametothefoot 
of battlements shooting up into space — bat- 
tlements that rose like flames rooted in clouds, 
and burning so brightly that the strained eyes 
[127] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

of the soul pinched with the bliss of gazing. 
And still the soul of Father Guido climbed 
and climbed and climbed. 

'"It's too beautiful for purgatory; this 
must be heaven/ said the soul to itself, 
' but there's no door.' And indeed, myn- 
heer, there seemed to be no door, for the 
poor soul climbed up and up those topless 
cliffs, but found no entrance at all. 'There's 
no door! There's no door! There's no 
door!' the soul of Father Guido repeated like 
a prayer as it climbed beside the battlements. 

'"God and Mary help us!' it sobbed at 
last in despair; and no sooner had it said 
these words than it saw a little gate opening 
into the jewelled heights, and it flew up 
hopefully. 

"Outside the doorway it paused. There 
was a door, half closed, and the soul was 
afraid. It felt conscious again of its naked- 
ness, although the paunch was gone from 
constant exercise and hard muscles showed 
under its star-burned skin. 'I'm a thin old 
codger, though; not presentable to St. Peter 

[128] 



A Flemish Fancy 

at all. I'll wait behind the door-post until 
somebody appears.' So it pressed its ribs 
close against the door-jamb and waited. An 
hour went by, or a minute, or an age; still 
nobody appeared. Father Guido's soul grew 
anxious. 'I'll look inside — just one peek,' it 
whispered. 'One peek won't matter.' So 
it gently pried open the pearly door and looked 
in. 

"An armchair, mynheer, carved of jewels, 
like the battlements, stood beside the door, 
but the chair was empty. The soul looked 
farther. 'Hum !' it said thoughtfully; 
'there's no pater hospitalis here. I'm disap- 
pointed. And St. Peter's left no substitute.' 

"Father Guido, you must understand, 
mynheer," said Odile, by way of parenthesis, 
"had been pater hospitalis in his monastery. 
He took care of the guests, he selected the 
wines, he was jovial in welcoming those who 
came and tearful in bidding adieu to those 
who went; so he was distressed that no one 
should meet him at the gate of heaven." 

I nodded sympathetically, and she went 
[129] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

on: "A little weed grew in a crack in the 
golden pavement where the holy saint's feet 
had worn the flagstone smoothest, and a 
green scurf of moss pushed out here and 
there in the golden gutters. 'That's strange; 
that's strange indeed,' said the soul of Father 
Guido; but it had little time to wonder at 
small things like these, for the whole of heaven 
towered before its eyes. Streets and man- 
sions and gardens blazed with lights of a 
thousand colours; mansions of silver and 
amethyst and jacinth rose amid bowers of 
roses; towers and roofs and walls and lattices 
shone like jewels in changeless sunlight, and 
avenues of strange trees stretching farther 
than eye could see glowed green as emerald 
along streets of gold. 

"But there was no sound anywhere, myn- 
heer. Father Guido's soul held its breath 
with holy awe and fear. In spite of the 
warmth of the eternal sunlight sluicing its 
bare limbs, cold perspiration came out on 
its neck and face, and goose-flesh pricked its 
legs. The soul hid itself in a rose hedge and 
[ 130] 



A Flemish Fancy 

waited breathlessly. Nothing appeared. 
Still there was no sound. Presently the 
soul crept out again and pattered cautiously 
up the golden avenue, picking little rose 
thorns from its sides and back as it marched. 

"Glorious beyond the prophecies of saints 
and evangels was heaven, rising terrace on ter- 
race, height upon height, glowing with the light 
of gems, bourgeoning with gardens, and flash- 
ing with pools of clear blue water; so that the 
soul of Father Guido climbed and climbed, 
speechless and marvelling. And still there 
was no sound but those of its bare feet slap- 
ping the golden pave. 

"So the solitary soul came at last to the 
summit of all Created Things; to the Moun- 
tain that is like a Diamond, with the sun- 
light flashing naked swords above it; to the 
Palace which is carved like a human heart 
from a Jewel for which there is No Name; 
and the soul knew that this was the Home of 
the King of Kings, of the Verigod of Verigods, 
and it knelt on the pavement in terrified awe 
and worshipped. 

1 131] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

" But, mynheer, the naked toes of the poor 
soul of Father Guido nestled into the heart of 
a little thistle growing in the grass beside the 
golden stair leading up to the Palace of God, 
and the prick roused it from its devotions, so 
that it sprang to its feet abruptly, and bent 
over and rubbed the hurt digits. 'God save 
us!' it ejaculated piously. 'Salvation or 
damnation, that hurts! But I must go on!' 
And it pattered up the palace steps. 

"Mynheer, there were no guards at the 
steps. There were no watchmen at the door. 
There were no angels inside the door. The 
corridors were empty. But at the far end of 
the central corridor the soul saw a curtain 
hanging from ceiling to floor, red as blood, 
tremendous, veiling mysteries. 

"The soul of Father Guido went forward 
to see what the curtain concealed. It 
reached the curtain. It stretched out its 
hand. It touched the curtain. Then it 
caught the hem and pulled." 

Odile stopped and drew a long breath, 
watching me narrowly. 

[132] 



A Flemish Fancy 

"Please go on," I begged. 

"Mynheer, there was nothing inside !" 

"What?" 

"There was nothing inside!" 

"Ugh! Served him right, then," I 
grunted. 

"But no, listen. You have forgotten the 
power of God. The soul of Father Guido 
dropped the curtain and fell flat on the 
ground. It could not believe what it had 
seen, and it fell to screaming, the most hor- 
rible screams that heaven ever heard. It 
screamed again and again, like a child in the 
dark, like a little lost child. 

"And then suddenly, mynheer, there was 
a roar of wings, and loud singing, and a 
brightness new, like lightning, and the air 
was thick with angels playing and dancing 
and whistling. Father Guido had believed, 
you see, or else his soul would not have 
been disappointed and would not have 
screamed. He doubted as you doubt, myn- 
heer ! 

"And now, when St. Peter is tired, the 



Tales From a Famished Land 

soul of Father Guido sits in the chair beside 
the little gate to welcome newcomers, as he 
used to do in the monastery, and he is kind 
to those who come, mynheer, for he, too, has 
known what it is to doubt. " 



[i34l 



X 

THE SWALLOWS OF DIEST 

MY AUTOMOBILE broke down on 
the outskirts of Diest, and I was 
obliged to spend the night in the 
Gouden Kat — a typical Flemish inn. A dozen 
little round tables stood outside on the flag- 
stones bordering the Grand' Place, the sup- 
per room within was divided about equally 
among food, drink, and billiards, and ma- 
dame sat in state behind a showcase of 
cigarettes. There were no Germans lodged 
in the Gouden Kat so I was given the best 
room, and as I came down the tiny, twisted 
stair after a good night's sleep in a high bed 
with carved posts at either corner, a tester 
and lacy hangings, under a black crucifix 
and the faded eyes of a colour print of King 
Albert, a small gray feather spun slowly 
[135] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

down and fell at my feet in the doorway. 
There was a flutter of wings, and a swallow 
skimmed over my head, almost touching 
me, and out through the open door. 

A few gloomy citizens, an occasional house- 
wife, small boys and girls in neat cheap 
clothes and noisy wooden shoes stalked 
across the open square before the cathedral. 
A squad of German soldiers tramped by 
on their way to the Kommandantur in the 
Stadthuis. Soon mass was over, and a flood 
of grave, black-clad figures filled the square 
and melted away into the by-streets. A worn 
black flag fluttered from a pole on the very 
top of the church. 

"Madame, what is the black flag on your 
cathedral?" I asked, sipping black coflFee. 
"It was once white, that flag, monsieur." 
"But, madame! it is coal black." 
"Monsieur, it is the flag which we of Diest 
hoisted when the Germans came. Aerschot, 
Louvain, SchafFen — they were destroyed by 
the Germans. Diest," she shrugged her 
shoulders, "Diest is as you see it." 
[136] 



The Swallows of Diest 

Across the Grand' Place, behind the gates 
of a porte cochere belonging to a rival inn, I 
found my chauffeur, Alexis, busy with the 
broken motor. 

"Monsieur, this is the cylinder which does 
not march," he called loudly, his tricky eyes 
eager for praise and his mouth smiling blandly 
behind his curved moustaches. "More oil!" 
he ordered imperiously from the bent old inn- 
keeper who stood, cap in hand, watching; and 
while the man shuffled off with a wash-bowl, 
Alexis loudly continued to explain to me the 
difficulty. "I am mechanician as well as chauf- 
feur, monsieur,'* he declaimed, although I 
was well aware of the fact. "I will arrange 
everything. In an hour all is arranged." 

A side glance gave me the clue to Alexis's 
authoritative tone. The young wife of the 
innkeeper, a heavy flaxen-haired Flemish wo- 
man, watched smiling from the open door. 
Alexis's gestures and mouthings were for her. 

In the rafters over the motor-car I heard 
soft cheeping, and a swallow slid from a mud 
cup fixed to one of the timbers and stole out 

[i37] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

into the morning sunshine. There were 
other earthen cups, lined no doubt with 
feathers, in the shadow above us: three or 
four cups brimming with swallow babies. 
One after another the gray-blue mothers 
came and went, circling fearlessly over us, 
engaged in the sensible business of rilling 
the world with swallows. 

"In an hour, monsieur, all is arranged," 
Alexis repeated, trying to get rid of me. So I 
determined to stay. 

"Madame, a cup of the white beer of Lou- 
vain, if you please," I ordered. 

She answered my French with a question 
in Flemish. "Wat segt U, mynheer ?" 

"Wittebeer van Leuven, als 't je belief t, ma- 
dame." 

" Een potteke Lovens voor mynheer, Mar- 
ieke, allez!" chuckled the bent old innkeeper, 
coming up with a bowl of oil and shoving 
her with his shoulder. 

"Goed, goed," she answered, and disap- 
peared, still smiling. 

Alexis sulked, but worked; the innkeeper 

[138] 



The Swallows of Diest 

watched admiringly; I sat in a tiny chair 
propped against the inn door and talked with 
madame, while the swallows circled and 
cheeped overhead. The motor backfired 
when it was tested, and the swallows screamed 
in fright and fled through a cloud of stifling 
smoke which rose into their nests. But in a 
moment they were back again at work, filling 
the world with swallows. 

"Like the cannon, is it not?" said madame 
in sluggish, country-bred Flemish, speaking 
of the motor's tricks. "But the swallows 
return." She laid her hand on her breast 
with a curious, passionate gesture. 

"He is your husband?" I pointed to the 
old innkeeper, bent almost double over the 
motor as he watched Alexis. 

"Yes, mynheer." 

"You have children?" 

"I shall have one in three months — about 
All Saints' Day, mynheer." She spoke 
with the simplicity of a peasant, to whom 
life and death and birth and growth are the 
simplest things in a complex world. 

[ 139] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Are you glad, madame?" 

"Glad? No," she said after a pause, 
smiling still. 

"Are you sorry?" 

"No, mynheer." 

"He is an old man, your husband," I 
remarked after a long silence. 

"Yes, he is old, mynheer." 

"You love him?" 

"Love him? No." 

"Do you hate him, then?" 

"No, mynheer. Why should I hate him?" 

"Alexis, there, is a jolly fellow. What do 
you think of him?" 

"I do not think of him, mynheer." 

I changed the subject. She was only a 
peasant, yet she knew how to rebuff my 
levity. "Why did you marry, madame?" I 
asked, and my tone was serious, befitting 
the question. 

"Why does any one marry, mynheer? I 
was of the age — sixteen." 

"But why did you choose him?" I ges- 
tured again toward the old man, still bent 
[ 140 1 



The Swallows of Diest 

over Alexis as he tugged at the cylinder 
core. 

"I did not choose, mynheer. The swal- 
lows," she pointed to the earthen nests, 
"do they choose? Other people, do they 
choose ?" 

"No," I admitted, astonished at her. 
"It is Nature. They do not choose." I 
felt a sudden respect for the dully smiling 
enigma before me. Love? choice? romance? 
the adventure of living? — what were they 
after all? The stress of towns has bred 
these fantastic ideas in men's brains. This 
country woman knew she was no different 
from birds and beasts, and she knew that it 
did not really matter to anybody — not even 
to herself. In a few slow words, still smiling, 
she sketched the dull drama of her life: 
peasant-born, unbeautiful, bought from her 
family by the old innkeeper as soon as the 
Church permitted her to marry, twice a 
mother, but both her children dead, pregnant 
again: that was the whole story. She did 
not know that her recital was sad, or that 

[hi] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

it could inspire pity. She did not even know 
that it was interesting. She seemed to tell 
it instinctively, as a bird cries in the thicket 
or as a tired dog whines at the door. 

"Alexis, is the motor ready ?" I called. 

"Almost, monsieur/' he answered; then 
turning to the innkeeper he bawled, "Get 
me a pan and matches !" He rested his 
hands on his hips and stared insolently at the 
woman and me. "Monsieur has seen the 
flag on the cathedral ?" he asked. He con- 
tinued in Flemish, "The brave men of Diest 
ran up a white flag while the Germans were 
still at Liege! Madame says they did well to 
surrender." 

"I said that to surrender is nothing, myne 
heeren," she interrupted slowly, looking at 
me but addressing us both. "Every thing 
surrenders/' 

"Ha, madame! Foolishness! Talk like a 
Belgian patriot if you please. We never 
surrender, we Belgians: we fight, fight, fight!" 
Alexis swung his arm and waited confidently 
for my applause. 

1 142] 



The Swallows of Diest 

"Madame," I turned to her. "You think 
these things do not matter?" 

"They do not matter, mynheer," she said, 
smiling. 

"The invasion of Belgium? — that does not 
matter?" 

"It does not matter, mynheer." 

"Murder? arson? rape? pillage? millions 
dead and maimed? millions enslaved? Ma- 
dame!" I found myself addressing her as if 
she were a logician instead of a peasant. 

"It is nothing, nothing; I know it is noth- 
ing. I feel it here." Again she laid her hand 
on her breast with the singular passionate 
gesture I had marked before. "It does not 
change anything; it does not change the soil 
of the earth, it does not change the man, it 
does not change the woman, it does not 
change the child. Then it is nothing. We 
of Belgium are like rain falling on a field: 
they [the Germans] are like rain falling. We 
do not choose: they do not choose. It is 
all — nothing." 

Alexis leaped forward, his tricky eyes blaz- 

[143] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

ing, his moustaches stiff with anger. These 
patriotic outbursts were no new thing to 
me, yet I was astonished at him. He trem- 
bled with honest emotion. "Madame! You 
are no Belgian, you are no Christian, you 
are no woman!" he shouted. "You have no 
sense of honour, you have no patriotism, 
you have no decency. Bah! you would have 
us handed over to the Boches!" He stopped 
his tirade abruptly and addressed me in 
French, "Monsieur, the car is ready in a 
moment, if you please. This woman — this 

woman " He raised his arm as if he 

would strike her. All this time she had 
stood watching and listening, still smiling 
heavily and making no move. "This 
woman is a peasant, she is not human, 
she is a beast. . . . Here!" he called 
to the innkeeper, who had reappeared, "give 
me the matches. Hold the basin there. " 
He jumped back to his place and pressed the 
self-starter. The motor hummed with cur- 
ious coughs and gasps from the jury- rigged 
cylinder. "It will march until we reach 

f 144] 



The Swallows of Diest 

home," called Alexis, his voice still keyed 
high with anger. "Monsieur is ready?" 

I paid the modest reckoning and climbed 
into the tonneau. The woman stared past 
me at Alexis; even my "good day" was un- 
heard or at any rate unnoticed. The motor 
roared and the frightened swallows flew. 
The innkeeper flung open the double gates, 
removing his cap and bowing low, and we 
rolled slowly into the square. 

There was a patter of slippers on the cob- 
blestones behind us, a gasp and a choking 
cry, and madame was hanging to the run- 
ning-board beside Alexis, pouring forth a 
torrent of passionate Flemish. The Ger- 
man sentries before the Stadthuis across the 
square stared anxiously, passersby stopped 
as if thunder-struck, I looked back and saw 
the old innkeeper standing open-mouthed 
and motionless in the doorway. 

"Mon Dieu, monsieur, she wants to go 
with me!" muttered Alexis, mechanically 
stopping the car. The woman flung her 
arms toward me with a piteous gesture. 

[1451 



Tales From a Famished Land 

Her heavy, ugly face streamed tears. All her 
reserve, her self-control were gone. She 
had chosen at last, and she had chosen this! 

"Wants what, you fool?" I exclaimed, 
appalled. "Drive on, Alexis. Make her 
go back. You know the Germans would ar- 
rest us at the first sentry-post. Damn you, 
anyway!" I roared, my anger mounting to 
outraged brutality to think that a chauffeur's 
cheap amour might land us both in a Ger- 
man jail. "What have you done to get us 
into this mess?" 

He thrust his fist into the pleading face. 
"Go back, go back," he grunted, apparently 
without a trace of feeling for her. 

"You must go back, madame," I ex- 
claimed. "You must go back!" 

She ignored me and again burst into a 
storm of entreaty, all aimed at Alexis. "No, 
no, no, no," he shouted in answer to her pleas. 
"Go back to your husband! Go, you — ani- 
mal!" 

At that word she dropped from the car. 
"Go on, Alexis, quick!" I exclaimed. 
[146] 



The Swallows of Diest 

Her hand flew to her breast with the old 
gesture. As the automobile leaped forward, 
she walked a few steps toward the inn. I 
turned and watched her: Alexis stared straight 
in front of him. She wheeled and looked after 
us, her hand still at her breast, her body sway- 
ing from side to side. Then she looked at the 
inn, and again at the fleeing car. Finally, as 
we dashed away from the square, I saw her 
stumbling toward the wretched old man, who 
still stood in the blazing sunlight which 
streamed through the open doorway, while 
the swallows of Diest circled and cried over 
his hoary head. 



[i47 



XI 

PENSIONERS 

WILSON belonged emphatically to 
the genus Homo sapiens', species, 
Texicana; habitat, southwestern 
parts of the United States and Antwerp, Bel- 
gium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, 
and also sentimental. He was the only mem- 
ber of the American Commission for Relief in 
Belgium who flatly refused to fly the Amer- 
ican flag from his automobile; he was the only 
member who publicly declared that he said 
his prayers every night, but, as he confided 
to me once in a moment of great emotion, he 
had never in his life prayed for the President 
of the United States. The reason for these 
startling facts was that Wilson was an un- 
reconstructed rebel and wore pinned in his 
shirt, just over his heart, a little butternut 
[148] 



Pensioners 

badge which his grandfather had worn in '63 
— a symbol of the dead Confederacy and the 
Lost Cause. 

We used to sing him a gay song which 
ran: 

An unreconstructed rebel, that is what I am. 
For this fair land of freedom I do not give a damn! 
I'm glad we fought against them: I'm sorry that 

they won, 
And I do not ask your pardon for anything I've 

done. 

I fit with Stonewall Jackson: of that there is 

no doubt; 
Got wounded in three places a-storming Fort 

Lookout. 
I coched the rheumatism campaigning in the snow, 
But I killed a sight o* Yankees, and I wisht it 

had been mo'. 

I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do. 
I hates the Declaration of Independence, too. 
I hates the Yankee eagle with all his scream and 

fuss, 
But a lying, thieving Yankee, I hates him wuss 

and wuss! 

We called him "Johnny Reb," "Tex," or 
"Stonewall Jackson," just as it happened to 
strike us. 

[ H9] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

Wilson was disturbed about something. 
"The Socialists are right," he said, thought- 
fully, drawing his six feet two from the chair 
beside my office desk. "There's only one 
way to prevent wars — kill the spirit of pa- 
triotism. Look at that old fool out there !" 
he continued, bitterly, pointing toward 2 
gray-bearded Landsturm soldier in shapeless 
flat service cap, faded gray-green uniform 
and high hob-nailed boots, who, with gur, 
on shoulder, strode along the pavement of 
the Graanmarkt on his way to the Kom- 
mandantur: "That old fellow is probably 
a toy-maker in Nuremberg or a barber in 
Munich, and here he is wandering round 
Belgium ready to die for Kaiser and Vater- 
land!" 

"Mankind's a failure," I acknowledged 
cheerfully. "Go on, Wilson." I knew these 
moods. 

"The trouble is this," he drawled. "There 

are five old Belgians in the outer office who 

have come to ask about their pension money. 

It's the first time I've had to do with Yankee 

[150] 



Pensioners 

pensioners. They were here yesterday," 
he went on, impressively, "and for a solid 
hour I listened to one of 'em making patriotic 
speeches and telling me how he fought and 
bled and died for my country — my country ! 
— a damned Yankee pensioner." 

I laughed gleefully, and Wilson turned on 
his heel. "Sit down, you Johnny Reb," 
I gasped. "What's it all about? Are they 
Belgian citizens who fought in our Civil 
War?" 

"'Civil War'!" he quoted. "There you go 
again! Haven't I explained to you that you 
mustn't call it the 'Civil War?' It's the 
'War between the States.'" 

A timid, eminently respectful knock inter- 
rupted us, and Peeters, the clerk, thrust his 
head through the half-open door, bowing to 
each of us in turn. "The men have come," he 
announced. 

"What men, Peeters?" 

"The men who saw Mr. Wilson yesterday." 
He coughed apologetically. "The men for 
the pensions. They want to see you, sir." 
[151] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

I looked at Wilson, who was still meditating 
flight and cursing under his breath. "Send 
them right in, Peeters. Mr. Wilson and I 
are delighted to see them." 

"Delighted, are we?" my victim snarled; 
then his voice changed to honeyed sweetness 
— the sweetness underlying all Southern 
courtesy and hospitality, which is the sweet- 
est in the world. " A ah, goeden dag, myne- 
heeren, quel plaisir de vous revoir ! Mynheer 
van der Aa, Mynheer de Vos, Mynheer Dek- 
kers, Mynheer van Oolen, Mynheer Anderson.'' 
He introduced them with a flourish — a little 
file of old men, dressed in dingy Sunday best, 
with heavy leather shoes in place of the cus- 
tomary slippers or wooden blokken, each hold- 
ing his cap in his hand, each bearded and be- 
whiskered, each with thick weather-worn 
skin and little eyes folded deep in wrinkled 
cheeks. These were the pensioners. 

The first of them was scarcely five feet 
high. Little black eyes snapped out from be- 
neath his bushy brows, and he wore a sweep- 
ing white moustache and an imperial. The 
l[ 152] 



Pensioners 

second was tall and had once been blond; 
now he was bald as a prophet, and his great 
white beard swung from his heavy head like 
a broad pendulum ticking off the minutes. 
The third was blind; his graceful, narrow 
head tilted forward, a flickering smile played 
about his mouth, and I noticed that when his 
attention was strongly attracted his eyes 
occasionally turned up with a strange abortive 
movement, as if he might take the darkness 
by surprise and change it into light. The 
fourth man stood straight and soldierly, his 
knees tight together, his great feet splayed 
out from his ankles, and his arms hanging 
perpendicularly. He had an ox-like head, 
and his wide shoulders were heavy and 
stooped with age. The fifth man was an aged 
negro, and feeble-minded. 

Peeters handed me a little paper which I 
read aloud: "Jan van der Aa, Pieter de Vos, 
Georges Dekkers, Willem van Oolen, David 
Anderson. Is that right ?" 

" Ja, ja, mynheer" — " Parfaitement, mon- 
sieur" — "Yes, sair," the voices quavered. 

[iS3] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

"Don't you all speak English ?" I de- 
manded. "You're entitled to American pen- 
sion money, yet you don't speak our language ? 
Vous ne parlez pas " 

The little man with the imperial burst 
into volcanic speech. "Sir," he ejaculated, 
"they have forgotten the Eengleesh, but I — 
I speak it pairfectly." 

Wilson sighed. "Yes, hang it, he does!" 
he whispered to me. "He's the damnedest, 
convincingest, Fourth-of-July orator you 
ever listened to. Now he's off! You can't 
stop him!" 

"You are Jan van der Aa?" I interrupted, 
after the first sentence. 

"Jan van der Aa, sir," he acknowledged, 
bowing, and continued impressively: "Sirs, 
you see beforre you five men who fought in 
the Grrand Arrmy of the Rrepublic, in the 
grrandest arrmy of the grreatest rrepublic of 
the earth." He rolled the rr's like thunder 
down the valleys of his speech. "It was not 
for nothing that we fought. Liberrty and 
Union are not little things. They are 

[154] 



Pensioners 

eterrnal. They are the same in everry coun- 
try and in everry time. We five were at 
Gettysburrg and Cold Harrbourr, de Vos was 
at Antietam, Dekkars was wounded at At- 
lanta, I was at Chickamauga underr Thomas, 
Anderson was at Peterrsburrg ,, — the strange, 
foreign accent turned the familiar battle 
names into mighty voices, voices to conjure 
dead men from the grave and dead deeds 
from the old books where they lie buried; 
the man before us was a born orator, he was 
winsome, sweet, powerful, pathetic, by turns 
— "Font Fisherr, Culpeperr Courrt-House, 
Vicksburrg, Shiloh, Champion's Hill, Cairro, 
Chattanooga." The tremendous words rolled 
forth; the file of old men stirred; they awoke 
and threw up their heads as he trumpeted 
forth these names, and I seemed to see 
them young again and soldiers of the Repub- 
lic. 

But Van der Aa stopped abruptly. He 
turned half apologetically to the others, 
speaking a most vulgar and harsh Flemish: 
<( 'k Heb 't verget — I'd forgotten what we came 

[155] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

for— our moneys," he said. "Sirs" — he ad- 
dressed Wilson and me once more — "our 
^pension moneys are overdue. We have re- 
ceived nothing since Antwerp was captured. 
The American Consul-General writes, but we 
receive nothing. Will you tell Washington 
of us? The Government have forgotten; we 
are far away, and so they have forgotten us." 

I turned inquiringly to Wilson. 

"Oh, tell them you'll get their money for 
them. Tell them anything," he whispered, 
harshly, fumbling his handkerchief. "Stop 
that devil of a Van der Aa! You don't 
understand; that man can talk you to tears!" 

"Mr. Wilson knows all about the case," I 
said. "He will cable to Washington the first 
time he goes to Rotterdam. We shall do 
everything in the world to get your money." 

Van der Aa thanked me with a gesture and 
a low bow, and repeated my words in Flemish 
to the others. They thanked us slowly. 
"And now, sirs " he began again. 

"Stop him, for God's sake!" groaned 
Wilson. 

[156] 



Pensioners 
"Mynheer van der Aa 



" the only things men gladly die for, 

freedom and union. Freedom and union, 
one and inseparable, now and forever." 

The spell came over us like a ghost — the 
ghost of something high and splendid — and 
the voice of America spoke in conquered 
Belgium. Not through American lips, but 
through the lips of an alien; and not the voice 
of America to-day, divided, disunited, en- 
slaved in a thousand ways to fear and base 
interests; not the America, I suppose, of the 
sixties, blatantly provincial, cursed with 
over-confidence, torn with civil war; but the 
voice of the ideal America — that America of 
the spirit which Lincoln must have seen as 
Moses saw the Holy Land from Mount Nebo, 
the America which may be, which must be; 
the mighty nation like a city set upon a hill, 
with the glory of heaven shining upon her, 
and young men and women singing in her. 
streets. 

I mopped my eyes; Wilson coughed and 
blew his nose. The five old men stood im- 

1 157) 



Tales From a Famished Land 

perturbable, and Van der Aa spoke on and 
on. He was pitiless and glorious. As he 
talked I saw a flag borne to the tops of tall 
mountains, flung over precipices, whipped 
through morasses and dismal swamps, flung 
up from the sea and set firm in rocky earth; 
and that flag was the American flag — the flag 
of Wilson's country and my country. These 
men had followed that flag — these five aliens. 
I saw freedom and union like simple things, 
things to be held in the hand as well as in 
the heart; necessary, elemental, homely 
things. And I saw the world-wide war which 
is waged in every land against freedom and 
union — the fight of caste against caste, of 
class against class, of masters with slaves, of 
the state against its citizens, of the thousand 
and one Frankenstein monsters of commerce 
and industry and politics and religion, fighting 
against the human beings who have created 
them. Everywhere I gazed there was war. 

"Liberty and union, one and inseparable, 
now and forever," concluded Van der Aa, 
his right arm outstretched to emphasize 
[158] 



Pensioners 

his last period, the eyes of the blind man 
straining up to catch the vanished sun. 

Next morning Wilson's motor car arrived 
an hour late at the office, and I noticed that 
from a staff wired to the wind-shield there 
floated a little American flag. 

"Yes," he said, defiantly, "I say kill pa- 
triotism and you kill war. I'm taking the first 
step. I used to be for the South against the 
world, now I'm for America against the 
world, and maybe some day I'll be for all the 
world against the world. 

"I'll see you late to-night," he added, very 
seriously. "I've got to go to Rotterdam to 
cable Washington about those old pensioners." 



fi59l 



XII 

DONA QUIXOTE 

HER parents had always regarded her 
as a sort of stepchild. There was 
Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, 
with fair looks and a proper dot, married 
at eighteen and mother of two babies; but 
Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although 
I did not know her until 1914, I can fancy 
the picture in the ancient moated castle of 
Drie Toren two years before when Virginie 
faced the old Baron, her father, and declared 
her independence of parental restraints of all 
sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Nu- 
midian lion, had a special vocabulary for 
matters which concerned his unmarried 
daughter. " Incroyable! penible! triste! ter- 
rible! effrayante! bete!" — I heard them 
dozens of times a day — and the shy, wilted 

[160] 



Dona Quixote 

floweret of a Baroness, her mother, sat with 
hands placidly folded, waiting for the final 
catastrophe which was sure to overwhelm 
her "pauvre Virginie" 

La Baronne Virginie was delighted to tell 
me of the famous interview with her father. 
She told it with shrieks and giggles, between 
puffs from one of my strongest cigarettes, 
her cold, gray-blue eyes — inherited from some 
merciless Viking ancestor who had once 
harried the coasts of Flanders — dancing with 
delight, and her bright golden hair waving 
as she tossed her head to give point to the 
jest. 

"'Mais, ma cherie, 9 il in a dit 9 

"'Mais, mon fere, 9 j'ai dit. . . . The 
devil! I forget always and speak French. 
That morning I was very angry, so I slid down 
the banisters and shrieked with the top of 
my breath, and there was my father at the 
foot of the stair, like this!" She made an 
adorable caricature of the leonine astonish- 
ment of her father at sight of the apparition 
of his daughter, her foot caught in her skirt, 
[ 161 1 



Tales From a Famished Land 

kicking vigorously to free herself and spread- 
ing tatters of lace petticoat over the Chinese 
carpet. "'Come here/ he roared, as if I 
were a servant. 'Come here, cher Papatje, 
s'il te plait. I have something to say,' I 
answer very respectfully, as a Belgian girl 
must always speak: 'I will not marry. I 
will not worship some man like Jules. (Jules 
is my brother-in-law. He has red hair and 
a wart on his nose. Ugh!) I will not have 
babies. I will not be as Elaine. No, no, 
no, no, no, I will not. I am going to England 
to be a suf-fer-a-gette. I will burn churches 
and bite people. I hate men!" 

"But do you hate us, really?" I inter- 
rupted. 

"Of course !" The light of her eyes was 
like the light on Swiss glaciers. "I hate all 
men — you especially." 

I was hurt, and showed it. 

"Ha! I do," she repeated, following up 

her advantage. "And I hate my father — 

enough, not much, just a little. 'Oufff! 9 he 

says to me, 'what for a person is this my 

[162] 



Dona Quixote 

daughter! Have I not give you all in the 
world, miserable one?' 'No/ I answer. 
'Freedom? No.' 'Freedom!' he says. 'Yes, 
freedom/ I answer again. 'It is the century 
of the woman. We must have freedom/ (I 
got that from an American book, but I did 
not tell him. He was so troubled already.) 

"So next day I went to England, and in 
England I burned one church and bit two 
people. " 

It was I who named her Dona Quixote. 
For all her Viking eyes she was a perfect 
Spanish type, such a type as one occasionally 
finds nowadays in villages of the Dutch 
Province of Zeeland or in the Belgian Prov- 
inces of East Flanders and Antwerp, almost 
the sole reminders of the days when the 
Dons lorded it in the Low Countries. She 
was not brunette, but a Spanish blonde, 
with a magnificent complexion burnished on 
the cheeks, straight, aristocratic nose, and 
jewelled mouth. The oval of her face was 
positively Mediterranean, and seeing her 
[163] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

glorious hair I knew what the Elizabethan 
poets meant by singing of "golden wires." 
She was adorable, perfect, and cold as frost. 

"But, mademoiselle," I began. 

"Madame!" she interrupted. "Always 
call me madame." 

"Pardon, but why?" 

"Never ask me the why of anything. It 
is because I choose. Isn't that enough?" 

"No," I burst out angrily. "I'm a reason- 
able being, I'll have you to know, and I 
must be treated reasonably. What the 
dickens ?" 

She laughed suddenly and delightedly. 
<k Ice, ice, I thought you were of ice. I 
thought all Americans were of ice, Monsieur. 
Good! You thaw. I shall tell you, because 
you know how to get angry like a Belgian." 

"Stop teasing me," I muttered, ashamed, 
sorry, and indignant. 

"At the convent school in Bruges where I 

went to school the nuns call us 'madame'. 

It is a school for the petty nobility, you 

understand, so we are called 'madame' just 

[164] 



Dona Quixote 

as the little Princess Marie-Jose is called 
* Madame' and not 'Mademoiselle la Prin- 
cesse.' I like it." 

"Well, I don't." 

"That is all one to me," she responded 
calmly. "You are to call me 'madame'." 

"I won't. Not until you are married, 
and maybe I won't even then. Maybe I'll 
call you by your first name." 

She examined curiously my flushed face, 
stubborn, unhappy, disgusted with my own 
boorishness, but seeing no way out. Her 
cold gaze took in all that she wanted; noted 
that I was a fly in her spider-net; and she 
dimpled and thawed graciously. "Please!" 
she begged. 

"Mademoiselle — er — er " I stuttered, 

"do you know Spanish?" 

"Not a word. But I have read "Don 
Quixote," of course." 

"Dona — that is Spanish for a noble lady. 
I shall call you Dona — Dona Quixote " 

"Wha-at?" 

For the first and, I was about to say, the 

[i6si 



Tales From a Famished Land 

last time, I caught her off her guard, aston- 
ished, wounded, a bit angry. But the one 
word was all I wanted. It showed me I 
could bully her. That word had been warm 
and human, utterly unlike the icy flood which 
normally came from her lips. "Dona Qui- 
xote !" I repeated blandly. 

"You shall do nothing of the sort. Don 
Quixote was a madman. " 

"Yes, and you are a madwoman. You 
won't listen to the people who love you." 

"You are not to say that word to me 
again." 

"What word?" 

"That word! You know — that word." 

"Dona?" 

"The other one: the one that begins with 
/ and has four letters!" 



166 



XIII 

IN THE STREET OF THE SPY 

THE Commissaire of the Arrondisse- 
ment of Metseys beat on the glass 
front of the limousine and arrested 
the mad career of the Government auto- 
mobile in which we were riding. The soldier- 
chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uni- 
form which the Belgian army now wears, 
with a small round button in his cap marked 
with the Belgian colours in concentric circles 
— black, white, red) turned and looked back 
into the car inquiringly. "We stop here, ,, 
the Commissaire announced in pantomime. 

Just five minutes before we had rushed 
directly under a battery of heavy French 
guns blazing away like furnaces. I did 
not know they were French guns — although 
the accent was marked! — until the Com- 

[167] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

missaire told me; but then he knew every 
battery, every cantonment, every airdrome, 
and every hospital in that little bit of Bel- 
gium behind the Yser lines which is still free 
from the invaders. As we passed the bat- 
tery, a wave of sulphur had engulfed us, the 
glass of the limousine rattled dangerously, 
and that mad chauffeur, putting on all power, 
had rushed us down the winding Flemish 
road, scattering stray groups of mild-eyed 
Belgian infantrymen and cavalrymen and 
grazing the metallic flanks of lumbering 
British motor lorries, their canvas sides 
splashed with Flanders mud, on their way 
down to the lines. He had rushed us over a 
little canal where two or three soldiers were 
fishing sleepily, in spite of the noise of the 
bombardment. He had dashed us alongside 
a field of over-ripe wheat, through a long 
avenue of stunted willows, across an acre of 
barbed-wire entanglements, and into the 
town of Zandt, its gray walls gleaming in the 
splashing sunlight which had just followed 
the customary morning shower, its claret- 
T 168 1 



In the Street of the Spy 

red roofs burnished like the morocco binding 
of old books. 

We stepped stiffly from the car on to the 
slippery cobblestones and stared about us. 

"The Germans shell Zandt almost every 
day," said the Commissaire coolly. "That 
French battery we just passed will probably 
wake them up. Put the car in the lee of that 
wall, Pierre," he called to the chauffeur. 
"We shall be back in ten minutes." 

"This, gentlemen," he said, as we walked 
down the principal street of Zandt, "is called 
the Street of the Spy, because, up to this mo- 
ment, no German shells have fallen in it. 
The population of Zandt pretend that it is 
because the Germans have a spy living in 
this street. Droll, isn't it?" 

We laughed with him. It is true that no 
shells had fallen in the Street of the Spy, 
but they had missed it by inches, not yards or 
rods. If I have ever said that the Germans 
do not use heavy calibre shells on unfortified 
villages and towns, I apologize. They use 
their very heaviest shells on these little 

[1691 



Tales From a Famished Land 

defenceless villages of west Flanders just be- 
hind the Yser lines; they throw almost daily- 
shells which are as destructive as cyclones 
into three or four room dwelling-houses. A 
row of such houses falls like a sand castle 
when such a shell arrives. 

"But the people want to stay here, of 
course/' explained the Commissaire. "Where 
can they go? The peasant and the man 
of the small town has no capital except his 
farm or his house or his zvinkel — his little 
shop. He has no bank account. He is 
primitive. He is simple. All he has in the 
world is here in Zandt. And so he stays. Yes, 
we give them gas-masks, for the Germans use 
asphyxiating gas very often here. But it is 
hardest on the children and the little babies. 

"Those boys we are sending away to-mor- 
row to a safe place in France/' He pointed 
to two youngsters, nine and seven years old, 
peering through the broken glass of a near-by 
window. 

"Are you glad to go, manneken ?" he asked 
the elder. 

[170] 



In the Street of the Spy 

"Oh, yes, yes, mynheer." 
"But why?" 

"Because one has fear of the bombard- 
ment, mynheer," said the boy, shivering. 

"This you must see," said the Commissaire, 
ducking his head and leading us into a small 
passageway between two brick walls. "It is 
the most interesting person in Zandt. She 
is eighty-three years old. She lost her only 
grandson in the war. She has nothing to 
eat except from her little garden. There, 
see!" 

We had emerged on the edge of a tiny plot 
of land, perhaps twenty-two feet square. A 
gray one-story cottage, covered with mossy 
thatch, bounded it on one side; low walls and 
an outhouse inclosed it on the others. The 
little plot was cultivated, densely, compactly, 
expertly — a mosaic of fruits and green vege- 
tables. Two apricot trees trimmed in the 
French fashion were trained along the wall, 
and a low vine, with some sort of pendent 
fruit, hung from the outhouse. 

[171] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

But strangest of all there were three beds 
of ornamental flowers. I stared hard at 
them, and suddenly I saw that they were 
graves! 

"Good-day, madame," the Commissaire 
called, touching his hat. "See, these are 
American gentlemen come to look at your 
little garden. ,, 

She came slowly from the cottage, a wisp 
of lace in her white hair, wearing the cere- 
monial black frock which a peasant woman 
puts on for such feast days as the Feast of the 
Assumption, a white apron, and leather 
shoes. "You are welcome, gentlemen, you 
are welcome," she said, with the grace of a 
chatelaine. 

" But aren't those graves ? " I asked, point- 
ing to the beds of nasturtiums, geraniums, and 
marigolds which covered three long mounds 
at the end of the garden, taking up almost 
half of the room available for vegetables 
and fruits. " Madame, aren't those graves ? " 

"Oh, yes, mynheer," she said. 

"They have not been here long, madame?" 
[172] 



In the Street of the Spy 

I was looking at the transplanted geraniums, 
well rooted in the mud, but not yet wholly at 
home, and the raw, muddy rim about the 
edges of the three mounds. 

"Since April, mynheer. I tend them my- 
self," she added proudly. 

I turned to the Commissaire. "None of 
those is her grandson's grave ?" I asked in a 
low voice. 

"Oh, no," he muttered. "Her grandson 
died in Germany. He was taken prisoner 
at Liege in August, 1914. Madame," he 
said to her, "the gentleman asks if he may 
look at your graves." 

"Oh, yes, mynheeren." She fluttered down 
before us, bent rheumatically at the first 
mound, and pulled at a weed which the rain 
had freshened. 

"Tray for the soul of Franz Mueller,'" 
I read in breathless amazement. "A Boche?" 

"A Boche, of course!" said the Commis- 
saire. 

"And the other two — they are Boches 
also?" Tray for the soul of Max Edel- 

[173] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

sheim' and Tray for the soul of Erich 
Schneider/" I read aloud. The neat wooden 
crosses bore also the regimental numbers of 
the men and the date of their death. 

"Boches, too. It happens that they were 
killed in this garden on a reconnaissance." 

"But why don't you remove them? You 
can put them somewhere else, and then this 
poor old woman can use all her garden. I 
should think she could hardly raise enough 
to eat from all this little plot, let alone from 
half of it." 

We had spoken in French, and of course the 
old proprietress had not understood. The 
Commissaire now turned to her, speaking the 
rhythmic, metrical Flemish of west Flanders. 
"Madame, the mynheer says that we should 
take up these bodies and place them in the 
churchyard. Do you wish it done so?" 

At first she did not seem to understand, 
and bent inquiringly toward the Commissaire, 
her little gray eyes screwed up in bewilder- 
ment at his words. "What is it, mynheer?" 
she asked. 

[174] 



In the Street of the Spy 

"Mynheer says that we should remove the 
three Germans and let you have your gar- 
den." 

"Oh, nay, nay," she remonstrated, shak- 
ing her head emphatically. "Nay, myn- 
heeren. God gave me these three graves in- 
stead of the grave of my boy. I could not 
tend them so well if they were in the church- 
yard. It is too far from my house. Nay, 
nay, let the three sleep here." 

"But you have not the room, madame." 

"There is room in my heart and in my gar- 
den, mynheer. I shall keep these three 
graves, and maybe in Germany there is some 
one who will keep the grave of my boy." 

"Messieurs, there is no use arguing with a 
Belgian peasant," said the Commissaire of 
Metseys, as we walked back through the 
Street of the Spy to our waiting automobile. 
"But she has a fine spirit, that old grand- 
mother." 



[i75l 



XIV 

THE WHITE ISLAND 
A STORY OF THE GALLIPOLI ADVENTURE 

THE aviation launch rolled slowly in 
the grip of the grounds well behind 
one of the desolate islands off Tene- 
dos, southwest of the entrance to the Dar- 
danelles. The afternoon was windless and 
humid. Warm, dripping fog covered the 
launch and hid from her the outlines of the 
rocky, treeless island in the lee of which she 
lay. Fog had sprinkled the deck as if with 
baptismal water, and the day was noiseless 
except for the lazy slapping of waves against 
the launch's side. 

A hydro-aeroplane alongside dipped and 
rose rhythmically with the launch's motion, 
and the aviator, Lieutenant Douka, of the 
Royal Flying Corps, muffled in a British 
airman's uniform, with thick wadded helmet 
[176] 



The White Island 

on his head, goggles, and rubber gauntlets, 
bent over and tested the bomb-dropping 
mechanism. Those who had known Douka 
as a student in America or as an unambitious 
idler in Paris would hardly have recognized 
him in his new role. He had always been 
romantic, but he explained this amiable 
weakness as an inheritance from his Byzan- 
tine ancestors. "My grandparents were 
Greek, you know," was his offhand explana- 
tion to college friends of his glowing fond- 
ness for the classics and things Hellenic. 
His two or three trips to Greece had been 
marred by the unpleasant contrast between 
the Greece he had imagined and the Greece of 
to-day. He could scarcely make himself 
understood in the modern tongue of Hellas; 
it irritated him, as modern English would 
doubtless irritate Chaucer. "A degenerate 
language and a degenerate people," he told 
himself. Yet he had taken up aviation at 
Pau, not as a sport — although that is what 
he told his friends — but as one of the gifts 
he could offer modern Greece when the day 

[i77] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

of her final fight with the Turk should 
dawn. 

The war came. He went hopefully to 
Athens. There came a day when King 
Constantine overrode his people, Venizelos 
retired, constitutional government in Greece 
ceased to be, and Douka went to London 
and volunteered in time for the Dardanelles 
expedition. 

But he gave no sign of all this as he tested 
and retested the bomb-dropping mechanism 
hanging between the pontoons which sup- 
ported the machine, and pushed and pulled 
the controls. He thrust his feet against 
the pedals and examined the petrol and oil 
throttles. "Right, lieutenant?" called the 
skipper of the launch. "Right, sir," he 
answered. "Belay there! Lively!" the skip- 
per shouted to two sailors who held the ma- 
chine. A mechanician spun the propeller 
and dropped from sight; the motor churned 
nervously; Lieutenant Douka lifted his hand 
and signalled that all was satisfactory. The 
launch shot sidewise, and the 'plane skated 

[178] 



The White Island 

swiftly forward, leaving a foaming wake. 
She tilted and shot forward faster, then up 
from the water and heavily into the mist. 
Douka swung her back and around the 
launch. Along the deck beneath him the 
sailors stood at attention, but a gust of gray 
smoke showed him that his escort was al- 
ready in motion, off for the mother-ship 
and the flock of aeroplanes at Imbros, and 
he was alone, sailing away to bomb the 
Sultan Omar, the flagship of the Turkish fleet. 
He looked at the clock — it read 3:17; then 
at the oil gauge — it was working properly. 
He climbed to fifteen hundred feet. Under 
him the mist lay like an Arctic snow-field, 
broken by pools of rotten ice through which 
the gray sea stared. The sea abruptly 
changed to gray land, and he mounted 
higher. He was flying at a height of four 
thousand feet over Asia, the ancestral enemy 
of his race and his continent. Somewhere 
down in the haze beneath lay Troy. Douka 
smiled bitterly as he thought again of the 
ten years' warfare, and of how the Greeks 

[ 179] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

had blotted her from the earth. The sullen 
roar of his motor seemed to stimulate his 
imagination. The mist thinned slightly, 
and he saw far away the narrow blue ribbon 
of the Dardanelles — the blood-thickened 
boundary between free Europe and the des- 
potic East. Haughty Xerxes once sat on 
those cliffs and watched his Asiatic worms 
crossing to conquer the West. Twenty-eight 
centuries had battled on that blue line. Al- 
ways it had been the same, age after age, 
century after century, always the Greek 
against the Asiatic, the Greek against the 
barbarian, and for five hundred years the 
disinherited Christian Greek against the 
Moslem Turk. Muffled in his helmet as he 
was, he began to sing an old Byzantine war 
song — a song his grandmother had taught 
him. His hate rose like a bird in a gale; his 
clutched hands bit into the rubber sheathing 
of the levers; he drove ahead at top speed, but 
his wrath seemed to leap out before him like 
a racer distancing the thing behind. To kill, 
to destroy, to blot out, utterly obsessed him. 
[180] 



The White Island 

High over the Sea of Marmora he flew 
toward Constantinople. Battles without end 
had been fought on the watery plains below. 
There the vast Greek Empire had struggled 
to the death with the hordes of Asia. The 
mist which had half hidden the land thinned 
and disappeared. The choppy air became 
cleaner and easier to fly through. He 
climbed to eight thousand feet. Far away 
he caught sight of the Golden Horn, the 
royal city of Constantine the Great, like a 
Grecian jewel set in Oriental gold, or like a 
Grecian body pierced by the bright spears of 
Turkish minarets. For five centuries she 
had been the spoil of the East. He cursed 
her conquerors and laughed to himself. 
What if he should bomb the mosque of Omar 
or the Sultan's palace? . . . He shook 
his fist at Scutari as if the city were a person. 
Little flowers of dirty-white smoke bloomed 
in the air beside him and above him; once he 
seemed to fly through a shower where before 
all had been clear, and he felt small pieces 
of steel drumming like rain on the wings of his 
[181] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

'plane. It was a burst of shrapnel. He 
laughed and flew on. 

Up the Bosphorus he drove, searching the 
sea with his eyes. The British Secret Service 
had reported the Sultan Omar at Bojukdere. 
He strained for a sight of her. 

Then suddenly, like a mirage, he saw the 
half-moon of a harbour and black ships at 
anchorage. He drew rapidly near. A vio- 
lent pufF of smoke rose from the funnels of 
the largest ship. She had seen him, or she 
had been warned, and was endeavouring to 
escape. He recognized her with a cry of 
delight. She was the Sultan Omar. 

Hidden forts on the green hills about the 
harbour burst into life. Smoke, flame, and 
the dull thud of cannon rose to him, for he 
was flying lower and lower. A shrapnel 
shell flashed just in front of him and showered 
steel splinters against his windshield. He 
screamed with laughter. It seemed to him 
ridiculously funny that they should think 
they could kill him or escape him. 

He volplaned; from seven thousand feet 
[182] 



The White Island 

he sank to one thousand, then to eight hun- 
dred — to seven hundred — to six hundred 
— to five hundred. A curving white wake 
showed him that his victim was in motion. 
He was almost over her. Rifles cracked 
as the crew endeavoured to reach him with 
their bullets. He did not hear them. His 
right arm swung deliberately back to the 
bomb-thrower. He was near. He was over. 
He jerked madly, and the pent volcano fell 
straight on the warship. 

The air rocked and heaved. His 'plane 
almost turned a somersault, and he fought to 
restore its balance in an atmosphere reeling 
like a typhoon. Solid waves of air beat and 
buffeted him. He jerked the levers and 
fought furiously. Then, like a bronco, the 
machine found her feet, prancing and shud- 
dering in the choppy air, and up he climbed. 
A glance over his shoulder was enough, even 
if the boiling air had not told him of his suc- 
cess. The blue sea was black with wreck- 
age; men like insects floated in the water, 
but the Sultan Omar had disappeared. 
[183] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

The air still cracked and roared as the 
Turks shelled him. The whole land seemed 
to wake, and the setting sun shone through a 
curtain of dirty smoke. A Turkish aeroplane 
slid up in long spirals behind him to cut off 
his retreat; petrol dripped slowly from a leak 
in his reservoir caused by shrapnel or a rifle 
bullet. It was the price of his success; a 
glance told him that he could not stop the 
leak. He had often thought of that moment. 
Should he go back and risk capture by the 
Turks? No; he would fly straight out into 
the Black Sea and die alone in its waters. 
He would fly out into the sea where his an- 
cestors had sailed centuries before the Mos- 
lems had taken Constantinople; the sea of 
the Golden Fleece, of Medea, of Xenophon 
and the Ten Thousand, of the long cam- 
paigns against the Persians. He would die 
there. 

The sun set swiftly. In the twilight his 

mind seemed to slip its leash and play high 

jinks with him. His palms grew into the 

handles of the controls and became part of 

[184] 



The White Island 

the mechanism; his fingers lengthened into 
levers, his legs into rods upholding the aero- 
plane, and he flew, screaming, laughing, and 
cursing, until night fell like a plummet from 
the dusky sky. 

Suddenly his machine struck the level 
surface of the sea and buckled forward. 
Douka awoke, as if from sleep, tore the har- 
ness from his aching head, and slumped for- 
ward against the straps, waiting for the end. 
The wreckage of his machine still floated 
on the long, slow waves, and rocked easily 
to and fro, but one of the pontoons was 
crushed and another was leaking. 

He felt no wind against his face, and the 
sea was calm. "Lucky," he thought list- 
lessly, knowing that at a touch of wind or 
wave the 'plane would go under. It might 
float for hours, or only for minutes; he did 
not care. Death was certain. 

But there seemed to be a sound of voices 
in the air, a distant singing and a splash of 
oars. "Delirium/' he said calmly. "But 

[185] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

how beautifully they sing! What is it? 
It is Greek! Why, it is the old Greek: 'To 
thee, Zeus, blessings upon our timid flocks. '" 
His wondering lips formed the words which he 
had learned in school. 

Then out of the darkness swam a boat, 
and in the boat were a steersman and four 
men at the oars, and the men were singing a 
hymn to Zeus, the Father of all and the King 
of all. To Lieutenant Douka nothing now 
seemed strange. To his shaken mind it 
seemed good to hear them, good to see them, 
good to find them loosing the straps which 
held him to the wrecked machine, and lifting 
him, in silence, into their boat. 

Half an hour they rowed, when Douka 
caught across the level sea a hot breath of 
wind and the odour breathed from rye- 
fields in midsummer. "Land! It is land!" 
he exclaimed. "It is land — the White Is- 
land," they answered gently. Both he and 
they had spoken in the classic Greek, the 
Greek of the old heroic days — not the bastard 
modern speech, larded with cruel words from 
[186] 



The White Island 

the Turks and the rough idioms of northern 
barbarians. His tired eyes strained forward. 
Like night mist advancing upon them came 
the land, white like foam and very fair; and 
he heard cicadas chanting in the olive trees, 
and the warm breath of the night brought 
murmurs of song and the sibilant lapping of 
waves along a sandy shore. 

All the island was white. A crescent 
moon stole out of cloudbanks and stared 
down on white sands, white balustrades, the 
white walls of palaces, white hills swelling 
against the darkness, silvery white olive 
groves, and slowly moving figures, clad all in 
white, pacing along the stairs. 

A white crane beside the landing-place 
awoke, flapped his wings, and flew slowly 
off. Stately men and beautiful women 
thronged the quay and looked down curi- 
ously as the boat grated against the beach. 
"We have brought another from the wars," 
the steersman called to them. "Welcome, 
friend," those on the quay called gently; and 
"Thanks, friends," Douka answered. 
[187] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

His tortured muscles knotted and failed 
as he tried to climb from the boat, and he fell 
back helplessly. Two of the oarsmen bent 
to him, lifted him like a child, and bore him 
between them up the long flights of steps. 
He had fainted. 

When he awoke, his nude body lay on a 
warm marble slab, and two male attendants 
of the bath were kneading his aching flesh 
with perfumed hands. Their touch was like 
ice and like fire, and life seemed poured back 
into his body as into a wineskin as they 
worked. The hands stole over him, gradu- 
ally more and more softly, exploring, sooth- 
ing, stupefying. He slept. ... He 
awoke once more, to find that they had 
placed him in what seemed to be a bed of live 
coals, in a white furnace which burned and 
leaped with light, but the crackling heat did 
not harm him, and again he slept. . . . 
He awoke in a high-roofed hall, and all around 
him was light and laughter, jets of fountains 
and music of slow streams; and the two at- 
tendants plunged him again and again into 
[188] 



The White Island 

pools which received him as into a bed and 
covered him with warm floods. 

Then he was rubbed with oils, and a gar- 
land was placed on his head. Two girls 
came, bringing him clothing — a blue-bordered 
peplos, a white mantle for his shoulders, and 
white sandals for his feet. "Drink," they 
said, and they gave him a cup of barley 
crushed in water flavoured with mint. 

"Now it is time for the feast," they cried 
gayly. "Come to the feast." And they 
led him through alleys bordered with white 
violets, hyacinths, roses, crocuses, and ghostly 
narcissi. In the cleft hills the olive groves 
gleamed like pools of moonlight; a waking 
dove gurgled drowsily, and the cicadas sang; 
and to left and right he heard faint snatches 
of old Greek hymns and saw white figures 
moving slowly along the sandy paths. 

So they brought him to the banquet in a 
high-roofed hall of marble, lit by flambeaux 
in sconces along the walls, garlanded with 
white lilies, and spread with Oriental tables 
and low couches. And boys and girls flew 
[189] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

laughingly about serving the meats and 
drink. 

He was led to his place, and reclined in 
the antique fashion on a cushion beneath 
his elbow. Then guests began to appear 
through the wide marble doors. To his de- 
light and astonishment he knew them. They 
were like old friends — friends of his youth, 
friends of the youth of all the world; and they 
came into the hall with garlands in their hair 
and bright robes upon them and gayety and 
peace in their looks. 

There came Achilles, his gigantic arm over 
the shoulders of Hector, and a smile on his 
youthful face as he talked; and goat-bearded, 
bandy-legged Thersites, limping and chatter- 
ing endlessly; and stately Nestor; broad- 
breasted, stout Agamemnon; Priam, leaning 
on an ivory staff; wily Odysseus, walking 
alone in the throng; huge, ungainly Ajax; 
gossipy Menelaus, Sarpedon, and Patroclus; 
Neoptolemus leading by the hand the sweet 
boy Astyanax; Diomedes, iEneas, smooth- 
shaven Troilus, black Memnon, laughing 
[ 190] 



The White Island 

Paris. And the women ! white-armed Briseis, 
motherly Hecuba, Andromache and gentle 
Cressida, Chrysei's, grave Cassandra, Pene- 
lope, Polyxena, Iphigenia, the lithe, dark- 
eyed beauty of Myrine the Amazon, and the 
golden radiance of Helen, her face like noon 
sunlight — Helen of Sparta, for whose sake 
the Greeks are forever named Hellenes, at 
whose shrine all men worship, and shall wor- 
ship so long as beauty endures — these came 
into the high-roofed hall; these, and many 
more. 

And after them came an old blind singer, a 
lyre in his hands, a laurel crown on his 
head. "Homer, Homer!" they cried. "A 
welcome to Homer !" All rose as he passed, 
and they led him to the highest place in the 
hall, and took their pillows again, applauding 
him. 

They poured libations and began the ban- 
quet, drinking from four-handled cups stud- 
ded with gold. They ate no flesh. {There 
was no mark of death in the hall, or Violence, 
or cruelty. They talked gayly, and all their 

[191] 



Tales From a Famished Land 

talk was of peace; they told old stones, but 
all their stories were of peace; and when they 
sang, their songs were of peace. And always 
the boys and girls served them, laughing. 

Douka drank from his cup, and it was filled 
again and again. Pain and hatred fell 
from him like a garment; he laughed and 
jested with the rest — with Paris of Troy, 
Paris of Asia, Paris of the East, smiling on 
his right, and bearded Odysseus on his left. 
"Tell us a tale, Odysseus," he begged at 
last, "a taleof your travels and your prowess." 
And Odysseus, shaking great tones from his 
chest like snowflakes in winter, told of 
Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinoiis, and 
the game of ball on the Phocaean shore. 

"Prowess?" he ended. "There is no 
prowess but kindliness. Only kindliness lives 
forever in the memory." 

Then Helen, smiling at them, cried : " Sing, 
Homer, sing, for the moon has set, and the 
Pleiades; it is midnight, and the time is going 
by. Sing of hearth and shrine, sing of youth 
and age, sing of love, sing of peace, sing of 
[ 192] 



The White Island 

the flocks safe from harm, the plowed earth 
and the groves, and the untroubled sea. 
Sing of the child nestling close to his mother, 
and of joy, joy, joy! Sing to us of these, 
old Homer." 

And Homer sang. 

At three o'clock in the morning a Turkish 
torpedo-boat patrolling in the Black Sea 
came upon the aviator who had destroyed 
the Sultan Omar. He lay in the wreckage 
of his hydro-aeroplane. The Turks took him 
unresistingly into their craft. They say that 
he sang softly to himself in an obscure Grec- 
ian dialect and babbled incessantly of Helen 
and the heroes who fell before Troy. 



THE END 



193 




THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



H 



fcb-79 




o 

Deacidified using the Bookkeeper pro 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: 



^o PreservationTechnoloc 

> C\ .0 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVE 









111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 

/"70/1\ 7-7Q-0111 







o- 

















/0^k DEC 73 




N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 46962 




-0.' ■<* 



